Title: The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Complete
Author: Meredith, George
Language: English
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THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND


By George Meredith



CONTENTS

  BOOK 1.
  I.        I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION
  II.       AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT
  III.      DIPWELL FARM
  IV.       I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR
  V.        I HAVE A DEAR FRIEND
  VI.       A TALE OF A GOOSE

  BOOK 2.
  VII.      A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD
  VIII.     JANET ILCHESTER
  IX.       AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED
  X.        AN EXPEDITION
  XI.       THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT
  XII.      WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE
  XIII.     WE CONDUCT SEVERAL LEARNED ARGUMENTS WITH THE CAPTAIN OF THE
            ‘PRISCILLA’
  XIV.      I MEET OLD FRIENDS

  BOOK 3.
  XV.       WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST
  XVI.      THE STATUE ON THE PROMONTORY
  XVII.     MY FATHER BREATHES, MOVES, AND SPEAKS
  XVIII.    WE PASS A DELIGHTFUL EVENING, AND I HAVE A MORNING VISION
  XIX.      OUR RETURN HOMEWARD
  XX.       NEWS OF A FRESH CONQUEST OF MY FATHER’S
  XXI.      A PROMENADE IN BATH
  XXII.     CONCLUSION OF THE BATH EPISODE

  BOOK 4.
  XXIII.    MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
  XXIV.     I MEET THE PRINCESS
  XXV.      ON BOARD A YACHT
  XXVI.     IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN’S BIRTHPLACE
  XXVII.    THE TIME OF ROSES
  XXVIII.   OTTILIA
  XXIX.     AN EVENING WITH DR. JULIUS VON KARSTEG
  XXX.      A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE
  XXXI.     PRINCESS OTTILIA’S LETTER
  XXXII.    AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO

  BOOK 5.
  XXXIII.   WHAT CAME OF A SHILLING
  XXXIV.    I GAIN A PERCEPTION OF PRINCELY STATE
  XXXV.     THE SCENE IN THE LAKE-PALACE LIBRARY
  XXXVI.    HOMEWARD AND HOME AGAIN.
  XXXVII.   JANET RENOUNCES ME
  XXXVIII.  MY BANKERS’ BOOK.

  BOOK 6.
  XXXIX.    I SEE MY FATHER TAKING THE TIDE AND AM CARRIED ON IT MYSELF
  XL.       MY FATHER’S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER
  XLI.      COMMENCEMENT OF THE SPLENDOURS AND PERPLEXITIES OF MY FATHER’S
            GRAND PARADE
  XLII.     THE MARQUIS OF EDBURY AND HIS PUPPET
  XLIII.    I BECOME ONE OF THE CHOSEN OF THE NATION
  XLIV.     MY FATHER IS MIRACULOUSLY RELIEVED BY FORTUNE

  BOOK 7.
  XLV.      WITHIN AN INCH OF MY LIFE.
  XLVI.     AMONG GIPSY WOMEN
  XLVII.    MY FATHER ACTS THE CHARMER AGAIN
  XLVIII.   THE PRINCESS ENTRAPPED
  XLIX.     WHICH FORESHADOWS A GENERAL GATHERING
  L.        WE ARE ALL IN MY FATHER’S NET
  LI.       AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER’S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT

  BOOK 8.
  LII.      STRANGE REVELATIONS, AND MY GRANDFATHER HAS HIS LAST OUTBURST
  LIII.     THE HEIRESS PROVES THAT SHE INHERITS THE FEUD AND I GO DRIFTING
  LIV.      MY RETURN TO ENGLAND
  LV.       I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT
  LVI.      CONCLUSION



CHAPTER I. I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION

One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley Grange were
awakened by a ringing of the outer bell and blows upon the great
hall-doors. Squire Beltham was master there: the other members of the
household were, his daughter Dorothy Beltham; a married daughter Mrs.
Richmond; Benjamin Sewis, an old half-caste butler; various domestic
servants; and a little boy, christened Harry Lepel Richmond, the
squire’s grandson. Riversley Grange lay in a rich watered hollow of the
Hampshire heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosed brook and pasture,
within view of some of its dependent farms, but out of hail of them
or any dwelling except the stables and the head-gardener’s cottage.
Traditions of audacious highwaymen, together with the gloomy surrounding
fir-scenery, kept it alive to fears of solitude and the night; and
there was that in the determined violence of the knocks and repeated
bell-peals which assured all those who had ever listened in the
servants’ hall to prognostications of a possible night attack, that the
robbers had come at last most awfully. A crowd of maids gathered along
the upper corridor of the main body of the building: two or three
footmen hung lower down, bold in attitude. Suddenly the noise ended,
and soon after the voice of old Sewis commanded them to scatter away
to their beds; whereupon the footmen took agile leaps to the post
of danger, while the women, in whose bosoms intense curiosity now
supplanted terror, proceeded to a vacant room overlooking the front
entrance, and spied from the window.

Meanwhile Sewis stood by his master’s bedside. The squire was a hunter,
of the old sort: a hard rider, deep drinker, and heavy slumberer. Before
venturing to shake his arm Sewis struck a light and flashed it over the
squire’s eyelids to make the task of rousing him easier. At the first
touch the squire sprang up, swearing by his Lord Harry he had just
dreamed of fire, and muttering of buckets.

‘Sewis! you’re the man, are you: where has it broken out?’

‘No, sir; no fire,’ said Sewis; ‘you be cool, sir.’

‘Cool, sir! confound it, Sewis, haven’t I heard a whole town of steeples
at work? I don’t sleep so thick but I can hear, you dog! Fellow comes
here, gives me a start, tells me to be cool; what the deuce! nobody
hurt, then? all right!’

The squire had fallen back on his pillow and was relapsing to sleep.

Sewis spoke impressively: ‘There’s a gentleman downstairs; a gentleman
downstairs, sir. He has come rather late.’

‘Gentleman downstairs come rather late.’ The squire recapitulated the
intelligence to possess it thoroughly. ‘Rather late, eh? Oh! Shove him
into a bed, and give him hot brandy and water, and be hanged to him!’

Sewis had the office of tempering a severely distasteful announcement to
the squire.

He resumed: ‘The gentleman doesn’t talk of staying. That is not his
business. It ‘s rather late for him to arrive.’

‘Rather late!’ roared the squire. ‘Why, what’s it o’clock?’

Reaching a hand to the watch over his head, he caught sight of the
unearthly hour. ‘A quarter to two? Gentleman downstairs? Can’t be that
infernal apothecary who broke ‘s engagement to dine with me last night?
By George, if it is I’ll souse him; I’ll drench him from head to heel
as though the rascal ‘d been drawn through the duck-pond. Two o’clock in
the morning? Why, the man’s drunk. Tell him I’m a magistrate, and I’ll
commit him, deuce take him; give him fourteen days for a sot; another
fourteen for impudence. I’ve given a month ‘fore now. Comes to me, a
Justice of the peace!--man ‘s mad! Tell him he’s in peril of a lunatic
asylum. And doesn’t talk of staying? Lift him out o’ the house on the
top o’ your boot, Sewis, and say it ‘s mine; you ‘ve my leave.’

Sewis withdrew a step from the bedside. At a safe distance he fronted
his master steadily; almost admonishingly. ‘It ‘s Mr. Richmond, sir,’ he
said.

‘Mr....’ The squire checked his breath. That was a name never uttered at
the Grange. ‘The scoundrel?’ he inquired harshly, half in a tone of one
assuring himself, and his rigid dropped jaw shut.

The fact had to be denied or affirmed instantly, and Sewis was silent.

Grasping his bedclothes in a lump, the squire cried:

‘Downstairs? downstairs, Sewis? You’ve admitted him into my house?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You have!’

‘He is not in the house, sir.’

‘You have! How did you speak to him, then?’

‘Out of my window, sir.’

‘What place here is the scoundrel soiling now?’

‘He is on the doorstep outside the house.’

‘Outside, is he? and the door’s locked?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Let him rot there!’

By this time the midnight visitor’s patience had become exhausted. A
renewal of his clamour for immediate attention fell on the squire’s ear,
amazing him to stupefaction at such challengeing insolence.

‘Hand me my breeches,’ he called to Sewis; ‘I can’t think brisk out of
my breeches.’

Sewis held the garment ready. The squire jumped from the bed, fuming
speechlessly, chafing at gaiters and braces, cravat and coat, and
allowed his buttons to be fitted neatly on his calves; the hammering at
the hall-door and plucking at the bell going on without intermission.
He wore the aspect of one who assumes a forced composure under the
infliction of outrages on his character in a Court of Law, where he must
of necessity listen and lock his boiling replies within his indignant
bosom.

‘Now, Sewis, now my horsewhip,’ he remarked, as if it had been a simple
adjunct of his equipment.

‘Your hat, sir?’

‘My horsewhip, I said.’

‘Your hat is in the hall,’ Sewis observed gravely.

‘I asked you for my horsewhip.’

‘That is not to be found anywhere,’ said Sewis.

The squire was diverted from his objurgations against this piece
of servitorial defiance by his daughter Dorothy’s timid appeal for
permission to come in. Sewis left the room. Presently the squire
descended, fully clad, and breathing sharply from his nostrils. Servants
were warned off out of hearing; none but Sewis stood by.

The squire himself unbolted the door, and threw it open to the limit of
the chain.

‘Who’s there?’ he demanded.

A response followed promptly from outside: ‘I take you to be Mr. Harry
Lepel Beltham. Correct me if I err. Accept my apologies for disturbing
you at a late hour of the night, I pray.’

‘Your name?’

‘Is plain Augustus Fitz-George Roy Richmond at this moment, Mr. Beltham.
You will recognize me better by opening your door entirely: voices are
deceptive. You were born a gentleman, Mr. Beltham, and will not reduce
me to request you to behave like one. I am now in the position, as
it were, of addressing a badger in his den. It is on both sides
unsatisfactory. It reflects egregious discredit upon you, the
householder.’

The squire hastily bade Sewis see that the passages to the sleeping
apartments were barred, and flung the great chain loose. He was acting
under strong control of his temper.

It was a quiet grey night, and as the doors flew open, a largely-built
man, dressed in a high-collared great-coat and fashionable hat of the
time, stood clearly defined to view. He carried a light cane, with the
point of the silver handle against his under lip. There was nothing
formidable in his appearance, and his manner was affectedly affable. He
lifted his hat as soon as he found himself face to face with the squire,
disclosing a partially bald head, though his whiskering was luxuriant,
and a robust condition of manhood was indicated by his erect attitude
and the immense swell of his furred great-coat at the chest. His
features were exceedingly frank and cheerful. From his superior height,
he was enabled to look down quite royally on the man whose repose he had
disturbed.

The following conversation passed between them.

‘You now behold who it is, Mr. Beltham, that acknowledges to the
misfortune of arousing you at an unseemly hour--unbetimes, as our
gossips in mother Saxon might say--and with profound regret, sir, though
my habit is to take it lightly.’

‘Have you any accomplices lurking about here?’

‘I am alone.’

‘What ‘s your business?’

‘I have no business.’

‘You have no business to be here, no. I ask you what ‘s the object of
your visit?’

‘Permit me first to speak of the cause of my protracted arrival,
sir. The ridicule of casting it on the post-boys will strike you, Mr.
Beltham, as it does me. Nevertheless, I must do it; I have no resource.
Owing to a rascal of the genus, incontinent in liquor, I have this night
walked seven miles from Ewling. My complaint against him is not on my
own account.’

‘What brought you here at all?’

‘Can you ask me?’

‘I ask you what brought you to my house at all?’

‘True, I might have slept at Ewling.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘For the reason, Mr. Beltham, which brought me here originally. I could
not wait-not a single minute. So far advanced to the neighbourhood, I
would not be retarded, and I came on. I crave your excuses for the
hour of my arrival. The grounds for my coming at all you will very well
understand, and you will applaud me when I declare to you that I come
to her penitent; to exculpate myself, certainly, but despising
self-justification. I love my wife, Mr. Beltham. Yes; hear me out, sir.
I can point to my unhappy star, and say, blame that more than me. That
star of my birth and most disastrous fortunes should plead on my behalf
to you; to my wife at least it will.’

‘You’ve come to see my daughter Marian, have you?’

‘My wife, sir.’

‘You don’t cross my threshold while I live.’

‘You compel her to come out to me?’

‘She stays where she is, poor wretch, till the grave takes her. You’ve
done your worst; be off.’

‘Mr. Beltham, I am not to be restrained from the sight of my wife.’

‘Scamp!’

‘By no scurrilous epithets from a man I am bound to respect will I be
deterred or exasperated.’

‘Damned scamp, I say!’ The squire having exploded his wrath gave it
free way. ‘I’ve stopped my tongue all this while before a scoundrel ‘d
corkscrew the best-bottled temper right or left, go where you will one
end o’ the world to the other, by God! And here ‘s a scoundrel stinks of
villany, and I’ve proclaimed him ‘ware my gates as a common trespasser,
and deserves hanging if ever rook did nailed hard and fast to my barn
doors! comes here for my daughter, when he got her by stealing her,
scenting his carcase, and talking ‘bout his birth, singing what not sort
o’ foreign mewin’ stuff, and she found him out a liar and a beast, by
God! And she turned home. My doors are open to my flesh and blood. And
here she halts, I say, ‘gainst the law, if the law’s against me. She’s
crazed: you’ve made her mad; she knows none of us, not even her boy. Be
off; you’ve done your worst; the light’s gone clean out in her; and hear
me, you Richmond, or Roy, or whatever you call yourself, I tell you I
thank the Lord she has lost her senses. See her or not, you ‘ve no hold
on her, and see her you shan’t while I go by the name of a man.’

Mr. Richmond succeeded in preserving an air of serious deliberation
under the torrent of this tremendous outburst, which was marked by
scarce a pause in the delivery.

He said, ‘My wife deranged! I might presume it too truly an inherited
disease. Do you trifle with me, sir? Her reason unseated! and can you
pretend to the right of dividing us? If this be as you say--Oh! ten
thousand times the stronger my claim, my absolute claim, to cherish her.
Make way for me, Mr. Beltham. I solicit humbly the holiest privilege
sorrow can crave of humanity. My wife! my wife! Make way for me, sir.’

His figure was bent to advance. The squire shouted an order to Sewis to
run round to the stables and slip the dogs loose.

‘Is it your final decision?’ Mr. Richmond asked.

‘Damn your fine words! Yes, it is. I keep my flock clear of a foul
sheep.’

‘Mr. Beltham, I implore you, be merciful. I submit to any conditions:
only let me see her. I will walk the park till morning, but say that an
interview shall be granted in the morning. Frankly, sir, it is not my
intention to employ force: I throw myself utterly on your mercy. I love
the woman; I have much to repent of. I see her, and I go; but once I
must see her. So far I also speak positively.’

‘Speak as positively as you like,’ said the squire.

‘By the laws of nature and the laws of man, Marian Richmond is mine to
support and comfort, and none can hinder me, Mr. Beltham; none, if I
resolve to take her to myself.’

‘Can’t they!’ said the squire.

‘A curse be on him, heaven’s lightnings descend on him, who keeps
husband from wife in calamity!’

The squire whistled for his dogs.

As if wounded to the quick by this cold-blooded action, Mr. Richmond
stood to his fullest height.

‘Nor, sir, on my application during to-morrow’s daylight shall I see
her?’

‘Nor, sir, on your application’--the squire drawled in uncontrollable
mimicking contempt of the other’s florid forms of speech, ending in his
own style,--‘no, you won’t.’

‘You claim a paternal right to refuse me: my wife is your child. Good. I
wish to see my son.’

On that point the squire was equally decided. ‘You can’t. He’s asleep.’

‘I insist.’

‘Nonsense: I tell you he’s a-bed and asleep.’

‘I repeat, I insist.’

‘When the boy’s fast asleep, man!’

‘The boy is my flesh and blood. You have spoken for your daughter--I
speak for my son. I will see him, though I have to batter at your doors
till sunrise.’

Some minutes later the boy was taken out of his bed by his aunt Dorothy,
who dressed him by the dark window-light, crying bitterly, while she
said, ‘Hush, hush!’ and fastened on his small garments between tender
huggings of his body and kissings of his cheeks. He was told that he had
nothing to be afraid of. A gentleman wanted to see him: nothing more.
Whether the gentleman was a good gentleman, and not a robber, he could
not learn but his aunt Dorothy, having wrapped him warm in shawl and
comforter, and tremblingly tied his hat-strings under his chin, assured
him, with convulsive caresses, that it would soon be over, and he would
soon be lying again snug and happy in his dear little bed. She handed
him to Sewis on the stairs, keeping his fingers for an instant to kiss
them: after which, old Sewis, the lord of the pantry, where all sweet
things were stored, deposited him on the floor of the hall, and he
found himself facing the man of the night. It appeared to him that the
stranger was of enormous size, like the giants of fairy books: for as
he stood a little out of the doorway there was a peep of night sky and
trees behind him, and the trees looked very much smaller, and hardly any
sky was to be seen except over his shoulders.

The squire seized one of the boy’s hands to present him and retain him
at the same time: but the stranger plucked him from his grandfather’s
hold, and swinging him high, exclaimed, ‘Here he is! This is Harry
Richmond. He has grown a grenadier.’

‘Kiss the little chap and back to bed with him,’ growled the squire.

The boy was heartily kissed and asked if he had forgotten his papa. He
replied that he had no papa: he had a mama and a grandpapa. The stranger
gave a deep groan.

‘You see what you have done; you have cut me off from my own,’ he said
terribly to the squire; but tried immediately to soothe the urchin with
nursery talk and the pats on the shoulder which encourage a little boy
to grow fast and tall. ‘Four years of separation,’ he resumed, ‘and my
son taught to think that he has no father. By heavens! it is infamous,
it is a curst piece of inhumanity. Mr. Beltham, if I do not see my wife,
I carry off my son.’

‘You may ask till you’re hoarse, you shall never see her in this house
while I am here to command,’ said the squire.

‘Very well; then Harry Richmond changes homes. I take him. The affair is
concluded.’

‘You take him from his mother?’ the squire sang out.

‘You swear to me she has lost her wits; she cannot suffer. I can.
I shall not expect from you, Mr. Beltham, the minutest particle of
comprehension of a father’s feelings. You are earthy; you are an
animal.’

The squire saw that he was about to lift the boy, and said, ‘Stop, never
mind that. Stop, look at the case. You can call again to-morrow, and you
can see me and talk it over.’

‘Shall I see my wife?’

‘No, you shan’t.’

‘You remain faithful to your word, sir, do you?’

‘I do.’

‘Then I do similarly.’

‘What! Stop! Not to take a child like that out of a comfortable house at
night in Winter, man?’

‘Oh, the night is temperate and warm; he shall not remain in a house
where his father is dishonoured.’

‘Stop! not a bit of it,’ cried the squire. ‘No one speaks of you. I
give you my word, you ‘re never mentioned by man, woman or child in the
house.’

‘Silence concerning a father insinuates dishonour, Mr. Beltham.’

‘Damn your fine speeches, and keep your blackguardly hands off that
boy,’ the squire thundered. ‘Mind, if you take him, he goes for good. He
doesn’t get a penny from me if you have the bringing of him up. You’ve
done for him, if you decide that way. He may stand here a beggar in a
stolen coat like you, and I won’t own him. Here, Harry, come to me; come
to your grandad.’

Mr. Richmond caught the boy just when he was turning to run.

‘That gentleman,’ he said, pointing to the squire, ‘is your grandpapa. I
am your papa. You must learn at any cost to know and love your papa. If
I call for you to-morrow or next day they will have played tricks with
Harry Richmond, and hid him. Mr. Beltham, I request you, for the final
time, to accord me your promise observe, I accept your promise--that I
shall, at my demand, to-morrow or the next day, obtain an interview with
my wife.’

The squire coughed out an emphatic ‘Never!’ and fortified it with an
oath as he repeated it upon a fuller breath.

‘Sir, I will condescend to entreat you to grant this permission,’ said
Mr. Richmond, urgently.

‘No, never: I won’t!’ rejoined the squire, red in the face from a fit of
angry coughing. ‘I won’t; but stop, put down that boy; listen to me, you
Richmond! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I ‘ll--if you swear on a Bible,
like a cadger before a bench of magistrates, you’ll never show your face
within a circuit o’ ten miles hereabouts, and won’t trouble the boy if
you meet him, or my daughter or me, or any one of us-hark ye, I’ll do
this: let go the boy, and I’ll give ye five hundred--I’ll give ye a
cheque on my banker for a thousand pounds; and, hark me out, you do
this, you swear, as I said, on the servants’ Bible, in the presence of
my butler and me, “Strike you dead as Ananias and t’ other one if you
don’t keep to it,” do that now, here, on the spot, and I’ll engage to
see you paid fifty pounds a year into the bargain. Stop! and I’ll pay
your debts under two or three hundred. For God’s sake, let go the boy!
You shall have fifty guineas on account this minute. Let go the boy! And
your son--there, I call him your son--your son, Harry Richmond, shall
inherit from me; he shall have Riversley and the best part of my
property, if not every bit of it. Is it a bargain? Will you swear?
Don’t, and the boy’s a beggar, he’s a stranger here as much as you. Take
him, and by the Lord, you ruin him. There now, never mind, stay, down
with him. He’s got a cold already; ought to be in his bed; let the boy
down!’

‘You offer me money,’ Mr. Richmond answered.

‘That is one of the indignities belonging to a connection with a man
like you. You would have me sell my son. To see my afflicted wife I
would forfeit my heart’s yearnings for my son; your money, sir, I toss
to the winds; and I am under the necessity of informing you that I
despise and loathe you. I shrink from the thought of exposing my son to
your besotted selfish example. The boy is mine; I have him, and he shall
traverse the wilderness with me. By heaven! his destiny is brilliant. He
shall be hailed for what he is, the rightful claimant of a place among
the proudest in the land; and mark me, Mr. Beltham, obstinate sensual
old man that you are! I take the boy, and I consecrate my life to the
duty of establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if
you live and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig’s
head to the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,--a common
country squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we have
mixed ours--and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on him--when
you in your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry Richmond.’

The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to
utter. He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy
about to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust
a delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips. Then, after some
moments of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly and
gazed down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his
eyes along the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee
and swaddled the boy in the folds of the shawl. Raising him in a
business-like way, he settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across
gravel-walk and lawn, like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the
whip has been applied.

The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and there
a light-blue space of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze smelt
fresh of roots and heath. It was more a May-night than one of February.
So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch and
fir-tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy’s terrors were
overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before been
out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs
were not loud. On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began,
he heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman’s voice that
he knew to be his aunt Dorothy’s. It came after him only once: ‘Harry
Richmond’; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park, among the
hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward
London. Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high and
nodded a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one
another; and his perpetual accessibility to the influences of
spicy sugarplums, notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to
prognosticate hopefully of his future wisdom. So, when obedient to
command he had given his father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his
shoulder, ceasing to know that he was a wandering infant: and, if I
remember rightly, he dreamed he was in a ship of cinnamon-wood upon a
sea that rolled mighty, but smooth immense broad waves, and tore thing
from thing without a sound or a hurt.



CHAPTER II. AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT

That night stands up without any clear traces about it or near it, like
the brazen castle of romance round which the sea-tide flows. My father
must have borne me miles along the road; he must have procured food for
me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead and drinking new milk, and
by-and-by hearing a roar of voices or vehicles, and seeing a dog
that went alone through crowded streets without a master, doing as he
pleased, and stopping every other dog he met. He took his turning, and
my father and I took ours. We were in a house that, to my senses, had
the smell of dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors were
painted black, and shut with a bang. Italian organ-men and milk-men
paraded the street regularly, and made it sound hollow to their music.
Milk, and no cows anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances
among them; my thoughts were occupied by the singularity of such things.

My father could soon make me forget that I was transplanted; he could
act dog, tame rabbit, fox, pony, and a whole nursery collection alive,
but he was sometimes absent for days, and I was not of a temper to be on
friendly terms with those who were unable to captivate my imagination
as he had done. When he was at home I rode him all round the room and
upstairs to bed, I lashed him with a whip till he frightened me, so
real was his barking; if I said ‘Menagerie’ he became a caravan of wild
beasts; I undid a button of his waistcoat, and it was a lion that made a
spring, roaring at me; I pulled his coat-tails and off I went tugging at
an old bear that swung a hind leg as he turned, in the queerest way,
and then sat up and beating his breast sent out a mew-moan. Our room
was richer to me than all the Grange while these performances were going
forward. His monkey was almost as wonderful as his bear, only he was too
big for it, and was obliged to aim at reality in his representation of
this animal by means of a number of breakages; a defect that brought
our landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my father’s companionship
caused me to suffer proportionately in his absence. During that period
of solitude, my nursemaid had to order me to play, and I would stumble
about and squat in the middle of the floor, struck suddenly by the
marvel of the difference between my present and my other home. My father
entered into arrangements with a Punch and Judy man for him to pay me
regular morning visits opposite our window; yet here again his genius
defeated his kind intentions; for happening once to stand by my side
during the progress of the show, he made it so vivid to me by what he
said and did, that I saw no fun in it without him: I used to dread the
heralding crow of Punch if he was away, and cared no longer for wooden
heads being knocked ever so hard.

On Sundays we walked to the cathedral, and this was a day with a delight
of its own for me. He was never away on the Sunday. Both of us attired
in our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my father led
me before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of British
victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention. I
understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we
remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and
dropped his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce
Nelson’s name or some other great man’s and this recurred regularly.
‘What are we for now?’ he would ask me as we left our house. I had to
decide whether we took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do
with capricious resolution. We were one Sunday for Shakespeare; another
for Nelson or Pitt. ‘Nelson, papa,’ was my most frequent rejoinder, and
he never dissented, but turned his steps toward Nelson’s cathedral dome,
and uncovered his head there, and said: ‘Nelson, then, to-day’; and
we went straight to his monument to perform the act of homage. I chose
Nelson in preference to the others because near bed-time in the evening
my father told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor
Shakespeare lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on
the ice to make himself interesting. I named them occasionally out of
compassion, and to please my father, who said that they ought to have
a turn. They were, he told me, in the habit of paying him a visit,
whenever I had particularly neglected them, to learn the grounds for my
disregard of their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me,
and imparted many of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be
tempted to give them a chance on the following Sunday.

‘Great Will,’ my father called Shakespeare, and ‘Slender Billy,’ Pitt.
The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over
the park after it by the light of Bardolph’s nose, upon which they put
an extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody
groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful
mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but
everybody in the park called him, ‘Father William’; and when he wanted
to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory
deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to
be steeped in the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of
the carcase; Hamlet (the fact was impressed on me) offered him a
three-legged stool; and a number of kings and knights and ladies lit
their torches from Bardolph; and away they flew, distracting the keepers
and leaving Will and his troop to the deer. That poor thing died from a
different weapon at each recital, though always with a flow of blood
and a successful dash of his antlers into Falstaff; and to hear Falstaff
bellow! But it was mournful to hear how sorry Great Will was over the
animal he had slain. He spoke like music. I found it pathetic in spite
of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by Bardolph’s nose.
When I was just bursting out crying--for the deer’s tongue was
lolling out and quick pantings were at his side; he had little ones at
home--Great Will remembered his engagement to sell Shylock a pound of
the carcase; determined that no Jew should eat of it, he bethought him
that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he said the Jew would not
see the difference: Falstaff only got off by hard running and roaring
out that he knew his unclean life would make him taste like pork and
thus let the Jew into the trick.

My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air,
and such liveliness--he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed
King Lear tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of
Falstaff--that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them,
which was better than understanding them. I required some help from him
to see that Hamlet’s offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish
moment of the chase, was laughable. He taught me what to think of it by
pitching Great Will’s voice high, and Hamlet’s very low. By degrees I
got some unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.

There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under
eight or ten years old. He could guess on Saturday whether I should name
William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, ‘Slender Billy,’
as I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of
his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me
solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion. If I named
him, my father would say, ‘W. P., otherwise S. B., was born in the year
so-and-so; now,’ and he went to the cupboard, ‘in the name of Politics,
take this and meditate upon him.’ The shops being all shut on Sunday, he
certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and,
as soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his
repeating a couplet,

       ‘Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry jam,
        When he heard they had taken Seringapatam.’

At any rate, the rumour of his having done so, at periods of strong
excitement, led to the inexplicable display of foresight on my father’s
part.

My meditations upon Pitt were, under this influence, favourable to the
post of a Prime Minister, but it was merely appetite that induced me
to choose him; I never could imagine a grandeur in his office,
notwithstanding my father’s eloquent talk of ruling a realm, shepherding
a people, hurling British thunderbolts. The day’s discipline was, that
its selected hero should reign the undisputed monarch of it, so when I
was for Pitt, I had my tart as he used to have it, and no story, for he
had none, and I think my idea of the ruler of a realm presented him to
me as a sort of shadow about a pastrycook’s shop. But I surprised people
by speaking of him. I made remarks to our landlady which caused her to
throw up her hands and exclaim that I was astonishing. She would always
add a mysterious word or two in the hearing of my nursemaid or any
friend of hers who looked into my room to see me. After my father had
got me forward with instructions on the piano, and exercises in early
English history and the book of the Peerage, I became the wonder of the
house. I was put up on a stool to play ‘In my Cottage near a Wood,’ or
‘Cherry Ripe,’ and then, to show the range of my accomplishments, I was
asked, ‘And who married the Dowager Duchess of Dewlap?’ and I answered,
‘John Gregg Wetherall, Esquire, and disgraced the family.’ Then they
asked me how I accounted for her behaviour.

‘It was because the Duke married a dairymaid,’ I replied, always tossing
up my chin at that. My father had concocted the questions and prepared
me for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon his
visitors and the landlady’s. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to her
invariable whisper on these occasions. ‘Blood Rile,’ she said; and her
friends all said ‘No!’ like the run of a finger down a fiddlestring.

A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him
out for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this
gentleman entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and
knees, and abused him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he
introduced him to me as Shylock’s great-great-great-grandson, and said
that Shylock was satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two
hundred pounds, or else all his body: and this, he said, came of the
emigration of the family from Venice to England. My father only seemed
angry, for he went off with Shylock’s very great grandson arm-in-arm,
exclaiming, ‘To the Rialto!’ When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor,
she said, ‘Oh, dear! oh, dear! then I’m afraid your sweet papa won’t
return very soon, my pretty pet.’ We waited a number of days, until Mrs.
Waddy received a letter from him. She came full-dressed into my room,
requesting me to give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on while
she arranged her blue bonnet at the glass. The bonnet would not fix in
its place. At last she sank down crying in a chair, and was all brown
silk, and said that how to appear before a parcel of dreadful men, and
perhaps a live duke into the bargain, was more than she knew, and more
than could be expected of a lone widow woman. ‘Not for worlds!’ she
answered my petition to accompany her. She would not, she said, have me
go to my papa there for anything on earth; my papa would perish at the
sight of me; I was not even to wish to go. And then she exclaimed, ‘Oh,
the blessed child’s poor papa!’ and that people were cruel to him, and
would never take into account his lovely temper, and that everybody was
his enemy, when he ought to be sitting with the highest in the land. I
had realized the extremity of my forlorn state on a Sunday that passed
empty of my father, which felt like his having gone for ever. My
nursemaid came in to assist in settling Mrs. Waddy’s bonnet above the
six crisp curls, and while they were about it I sat quiet, plucking
now and then at the brown silk, partly to beg to go with it, partly in
jealousy and love at the thought of its seeing him from whom I was so
awfully separated. Mrs. Waddy took fresh kisses off my lips, assuring me
that my father would have them in twenty minutes, and I was to sit and
count the time. My nursemaid let her out. I pretended to be absorbed in
counting, till I saw Mrs. Waddy pass by the window. My heart gave a leap
of pain. I found the street-door open and no one in the passage, and
I ran out, thinking that Mrs. Waddy would be obliged to take me if she
discovered me by her side in the street.

I was by no means disconcerted at not seeing her immediately. Running
on from one street to another, I took the turnings with unhesitating
boldness, as if I had a destination in view. I must have been out near
an hour before I understood that Mrs. Waddy had eluded me; so I resolved
to enjoy the shop-windows with the luxurious freedom of one whose
speculations on those glorious things all up for show are no longer
distracted by the run of time and a nursemaid. Little more than a
glance was enough, now that I knew I could stay as long as I liked. If I
stopped at all, it was rather to exhibit the bravado of liberty than
to distinguish any particular shop with my preference: all were equally
beautiful; so were the carriages; so were the people. Ladies frequently
turned to look at me, perhaps because I had no covering on my head; but
they did not interest me in the least. I should have been willing to ask
them or any one where the Peerage lived, only my mind was quite full,
and I did not care. I felt sure that a great deal of walking would
ultimately bring me to St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey; to anything else
I was indifferent.

Toward sunset my frame was struck as with an arrow by the sensations
of hunger on passing a cook’s-shop. I faltered along, hoping to reach a
second one, without knowing why I had dragged my limbs from the first.
There was a boy in ragged breeches, no taller than myself, standing
tiptoe by the window of a very large and brilliant pastry-cook’s.
He persuaded me to go into the shop and ask for a cake. I thought it
perfectly natural to do so, being hungry; but when I reached the counter
and felt the size of the shop, I was abashed, and had to repeat the
nature of my petition twice to the young woman presiding there.

‘Give you a cake, little boy?’ she said. ‘We don’t give cakes, we sell
them.’

‘Because I am hungry,’ said I, pursuing my request.

Another young woman came, laughing and shaking lots of ringlets.

‘Don’t you see he’s not a common boy? he doesn’t whine,’ she remarked,
and handed me a stale bun, saying, ‘Here, Master Charles, and you
needn’t say thank you.’

‘My name is Harry Richmond, and I thank you very much,’ I replied.

I heard her say, as I went out, ‘You can see he’s a gentleman’s son.’
The ragged boy was awaiting me eagerly. ‘Gemini! you’re a lucky one,’ he
cried; ‘here, come along, curly-poll.’ I believe that I meant to share
the bun with him, but of course he could not be aware of my beneficent
intentions: so he treated me as he thought I was for treating him, and
making one snatch at the bun, ran off cramming it into his mouth. I
stood looking at any hand. I learnt in that instant what thieving was,
and begging, and hunger, for I would have perished rather than have
asked for another cake, and as I yearned for it in absolute want of
food, the boy’s ungenerous treatment of me came down in a cloud on my
reason. I found myself being led through the crush of people, by an old
gentleman, to whom I must have related an extraordinary rigmarole. He
shook his head, saying that I was unintelligible; but the questions he
put to me, ‘Why had I no hat on in the open street?--Where did my mother
live?--What was I doing out alone in London?’ were so many incitements
to autobiographical composition to an infant mind, and I tumbled out
my history afresh each time that he spoke. He led me into a square,
stooping his head to listen all the while; but when I perceived that
we had quitted the region of shops I made myself quite intelligible by
stopping short and crying: ‘I am so hungry.’ He nodded and said, ‘It ‘s
no use cross-examining an empty stomach. You’ll do me the favour to dine
with me, my little man. We’ll talk over your affairs by-and-by.’

My alarm at having left the savoury street of shops was not soothed
until I found myself sitting at table with him, and a nice young lady,
and an old one who wore a cap, and made loud remarks on my garments and
everything I did. I was introduced to them as the little boy dropped
from the sky. The old gentleman would not allow me to be questioned
before I had eaten. It was a memorable feast. I had soup, fish, meat,
and pastry, and, for the first time in my life, a glass of wine. How
they laughed to see me blink and cough after I had swallowed half the
glass like water. At once my tongue was unloosed. I seemed to rise right
above the roofs of London, beneath which I had been but a wandering atom
a few minutes ago. I talked of my wonderful father, and Great Will, and
Pitt, and the Peerage. I amazed them with my knowledge. When I finished
a long recital of Great Will’s chase of the deer, by saying that I did
not care about politics (I meant, in my own mind, that Pitt was dull in
comparison), they laughed enormously, as if I had fired them off. ‘Do
you know what you are, sir?’ said the old gentleman; he had frowning
eyebrows and a merry mouth ‘you’re a comical character.’

I felt interested in him, and asked him what he was. He informed me
that he was a lawyer, and ready to be pantaloon to my clown, if I would
engage him.

‘Are you in the Peerage?’ said I.

‘Not yet,’ he replied.

‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘I know nothing about you.’

The young lady screamed with laughter. ‘Oh, you funny little boy; you
killing little creature!’ she said, and coming round to me, lifted me
out of my chair, and wanted to know if I knew how to kiss.

‘Oh, yes; I’ve been taught that,’ said I, giving the salute without
waiting for the invitation; ‘but,’ I added, ‘I don’t care about it
much.’

She was indignant, and told me she was going to be offended, so I let
her understand that I liked being kissed and played with in the morning
before I was up, and if she would come to my house ever so early, she
would find me lying next the wall and ready for her.

‘And who lies outside?’ she asked.

‘That’s my papa,’ I was beginning to say, but broke the words with a
sob, for I seemed to be separated from him now by the sea itself.

They petted me tenderly. My story was extracted by alternate leading
questions from the old gentleman and timely caresses from the ladies. I
could tell them everything except the name of the street where I lived.
My midnight excursion from the house of my grandfather excited them
chiefly; also my having a mother alive who perpetually fanned her face
and wore a ball-dress and a wreath; things that I remembered of my
mother. The ladies observed that it was clear I was a romantic child.
I noticed that the old gentleman said ‘Humph,’ very often, and his
eyebrows were like a rook’s nest in a tree when I spoke of my father
walking away with Shylock’s descendant and not since returning to me.
A big book was fetched out of his library, in which he read my
grandfather’s name. I heard him mention it aloud. I had been placed on a
stool beside a tea-tray near the fire, and there I saw the old red house
of Riversley, and my mother dressed in white, and my aunt Dorothy; and
they all complained that I had ceased to love them, and must go to bed,
to which I had no objection. Somebody carried me up and undressed me,
and promised me a great game of kissing in the morning.

The next day in the strange house I heard that the old gentleman
had sent one of his clerks down to my grandfather at Riversley, and
communicated with the constables in London; and, by-and-by, Mrs.
Waddy arrived, having likewise visited those authorities, one of whom
supported her claims upon me. But the old gentleman wished to keep
me until his messenger returned from Riversley. He made all sorts of
pretexts. In the end, he insisted on seeing my father, and Mrs. Waddy,
after much hesitation, and even weeping, furnished the address: upon
hearing which, spoken aside to him, he said, ‘I thought so.’ Mrs. Waddy
entreated him to be respectful to my father, who was, she declared, his
superior, and, begging everybody’s pardon present, the superior of us
all, through no sin of his own, that caused him to be so unfortunate;
and a real Christian and pattern, in spite of outsides, though as true
a gentleman as ever walked, and by rights should be amongst the highest.
She repeated ‘amongst the highest’ reprovingly, with the ears of barley
in her blue bonnet shaking, and her hands clasped tight in her lap. Old
Mr. Bannerbridge (that was the old gentleman’s name) came back very late
from his visit to my father, so late that he said it would be cruel to
let me go out in the street after my bed-time. Mrs. Waddy consented to
my remaining, on the condition of my being surrendered to her at nine
o’clock, and no later, the following morning.

I was assured by Mr. Bannerbridge that my father’s health and appetite
were excellent; he gave me a number of unsatisfying messages, all the
rest concerning his interview he whispered to his daughter and his
sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from
Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by
the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was
disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying
between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand.
There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to
her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a
whole day in different conveyances, the last of which landed us miles
away from London, at the gates of an old drooping, mossed and streaked
farmhouse, that was like a wall-flower in colour.



CHAPTER III. DIPWELL FARM

In rain or in sunshine this old farmhouse had a constant resemblance
to a wall-flower; and it had the same moist earthy smell, except in
the kitchen, where John and Martha Thresher lived, apart from their
furniture. All the fresh eggs, and the butter stamped, with three bees,
and the pots of honey, the fowls, and the hare lifted out of the hamper
by his hind legs, and the country loaves smelling heavenly, which used
to come to Mrs. Waddy’s address in London, and appear on my father’s
table, were products of Dipwell farm, and presents from her sister,
Martha Thresher. On receiving this information I felt at home in a
moment, and asked right off, ‘How long am I to stay here?--Am I going
away tomorrow?--What’s going to be done with me?’ The women found these
questions of a youthful wanderer touching. Between kissings and promises
of hens to feed, and eggs that were to come of it, I settled into
contentment. A strong impression was made on me by Mrs. Waddy’s saying,
‘Here, Master Harry, your own papa will come for you; and you may be
sure he will, for I have his word he will, and he’s not one to break
it, unless his country’s against him; and for his darling boy he’d march
against cannons. So here you’ll sit and wait for him, won’t you?’ I sat
down immediately, looking up. Mrs. Waddy and Mrs. Thresher raised their
hands. I had given them some extraordinary proof of my love for my
father. The impression I received was, that sitting was the thing to
conjure him to me.

‘Where his heart’s not concerned,’ Mrs. Waddy remarked of me
flatteringly, ‘he’s shrewd as a little schoolmaster.’

‘He’ve a bird’s-nesting eye,’ said Mrs. Thresher, whose face I was
studying.

John Thresher wagered I would be a man before either of them reached
that goal. But whenever he spoke he suffered correction on account of
his English.

‘More than his eating and his drinking, that child’s father worrits
about his learning to speak the language of a British gentleman,’ Mrs.
Waddy exclaimed. ‘Before that child your h’s must be like the panting of
an engine--to please his father. He ‘d stop me carrying the dinner-tray
on meat-dish hot, and I’m to repeat what I said, to make sure the child
haven’t heard anything ungrammatical. The child’s nursemaid he’d lecture
so, the poor girl would come down to me ready to bend double, like a
bundle of nothing, his observations so took the pride out of her. That’s
because he ‘s a father who knows his duty to the child:--“Child!” says
he, “man, ma’am.” It’s just as you, John, when you sow your seed you
think of your harvest. So don’t take it ill of me, John; I beg of you be
careful of your English. Turn it over as you’re about to speak.’

‘Change loads on the road, you mean,’ said John Thresher. ‘Na, na, he’s
come to settle nigh a weedy field, if you like, but his crop ain’t nigh
reaping yet. Hark you, Mary Waddy, who’re a widde, which ‘s as much as
say, an unocc’pied mind, there’s cockney, and there’s country, and there
‘s school. Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sediment. Now, yon
‘s my view.

His wife and Mrs. Waddy said reflectively, in a breath, ‘True!’

‘Drink or no, that’s the trick o’ brewery,’ he added.

They assented. They began praising him, too, like meek creatures.

‘What John says is worth listening to, Mary. You may be over-careful. A
stew’s a stew, and not a boiling to shreds, and you want a steady fire,
and not a furnace.’

‘Oh, I quite agree with John, Martha: we must take the good and the evil
in a world like this.’

‘Then I’m no scholar, and you’re at ease,’ said John.

Mrs. Waddy put her mouth to his ear.

Up went his eyebrows, wrinkling arches over a petrified stare.

In some way she had regained her advantage. ‘Art sure of it?’ he
inquired.

‘Pray, don’t offend me by expressing a doubt of it,’ she replied,
bowing.

John Thresher poised me in the very centre of his gaze. He declared he
would never have guessed that, and was reproved, inasmuch as he might
have guessed it. He then said that I could not associate with any of
the children thereabout, and my dwelling in the kitchen was not to
be thought of. The idea of my dwelling in the kitchen seemed to be a
serious consideration with Mrs. Martha likewise. I was led into the
rooms of state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the
kitchen, and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and
supping with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my father
across the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and not be
impatient, is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my father’s
absence. I knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the
world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from
the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter
the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of
the copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as
the History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their
venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could not tell me whether he
meant as old as the book of English History; he fancied he did, for the
furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but no one exactly could
swear when that (the book) was put together. At my suggestion, he fixed
the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period of heavy ploughing.
Thus begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as a place of extreme
baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my Harold. These
heroes lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently awaiting the arrival
of my father. He sent me once a glorious letter. Mrs. Waddy took one of
John Thresher’s pigeons to London, and in the evening we beheld the bird
cut the sky like an arrow, bringing round his neck a letter warm
from him I loved. Planet communicating with planet would be not more
wonderful to men than words of his to me, travelling in such a manner. I
went to sleep, and awoke imagining the bird bursting out of heaven.

Meanwhile there was an attempt to set me moving again. A strange young
man was noticed in the neighbourhood of the farm, and he accosted me
at Leckham fair. ‘I say, don’t we know one another? How about your
grandfather the squire, and your aunt, and Mr. Bannerbridge? I’ve got
news for you.’

Not unwilling to hear him, I took his hand, leaving my companion, the
miller’s little girl, Mabel Sweetwinter, at a toy-stand, while Bob, her
brother and our guardian, was shying sticks in a fine attitude. ‘Yes,
and your father, too,’ said the young man; ‘come along and see him; you
can run?’ I showed him how fast. We were pursued by Bob, who fought for
me, and won me, and my allegiance instantly returned to him. He carried
me almost the whole of the way back to Dipwell. Women must feel for the
lucky heroes who win them, something of what I felt for mine; I kissed
his bloody face, refusing to let him wipe it. John Thresher said to me
at night, ‘Ay, now you’ve got a notion of boxing; and will you believe
it, Master Harry, there’s people fools enough to want to tread that
ther’ first-rate pastime under foot? I speak truth, and my word for ‘t,
they’d better go in petticoats. Let clergymen preach as in duty bound;
you and I’ll uphold a manful sport, we will, and a cheer for Bob!’

He assured me, and he had my entire faith, that boxing was England’s
natural protection from the foe. The comfort of having one like Bob to
defend our country from invasion struck me as inexpressible. Lighted by
John Thresher’s burning patriotism, I entered the book of the History of
England at about the pace of a carthorse, with a huge waggon at my heels
in the shape of John. There was no moving on until he was filled. His
process of receiving historical knowledge was to fight over again the
personages who did injury to our honour as a nation, then shake hands
and be proud of them. ‘For where we ain’t quite successful we’re
cunning,’ he said; ‘and we not being able to get rid of William the
Conqueror, because he’s got a will of his own and he won’t budge, why,
we takes and makes him one of ourselves; and no disgrace in that, I
should hope! He paid us a compliment, don’t you see, Master Harry? he
wanted to be an Englishman. “Can you this?” says we, sparrin’ up to him.
“Pretty middlin’,” says he, “and does it well.” “Well then,” says we,
“then you’re one of us, and we’ll beat the world”; and did so.’

John Thresher had a laborious mind; it cost him beads on his forehead
to mount to these heights of meditation. He told me once that he thought
one’s country was like one’s wife: you were born in the first, and
married to the second, and had to learn all about them afterwards, ay,
and make the best of them. He recommended me to mix, strain, and throw
away the sediment, for that was the trick o’ brewery. Every puzzle that
beset him in life resolved to this cheerful precept, the value of which,
he said, was shown by clear brown ale, the drink of the land. Even as
a child I felt that he was peculiarly an Englishman. Tales of injustice
done on the Niger river would flush him in a heat of wrath till he cried
out for fresh taxes to chastise the villains. Yet at the sight of the
beggars at his gates he groaned at the taxes existing, and enjoined me
to have pity on the poor taxpayer when I lent a hand to patch the laws.
I promised him I would unreservedly, with a laugh, but with a sincere
intention to legislate in a direct manner on his behalf. He, too, though
he laughed, thanked me kindly.

I was clad in black for my distant mother. Mrs. Waddy brought down a
young man from London to measure me, so that my mourning attire might be
in the perfect cut of fashion. ‘The child’s papa would strip him if he
saw him in a country tailor’s funeral suit,’ she said, and seemed to
blow a wind of changes on me that made me sure my father had begun
to stir up his part of the world. He sent me a prayer in his own
handwriting to say for my mother in heaven. I saw it flying up between
black edges whenever I shut my eyes. Martha Thresher dosed me for liver.
Mrs. Waddy found me pale by the fireside, and prescribed iron. Both
agreed upon high-feeding, and the apothecary agreed with both in
everything, which reconciled them, for both good women loved me so
heartily they were near upon disputing over the medicines I was to
consume.

Under such affectionate treatment I betrayed the alarming symptom that
my imagination was set more on my mother than on my father: I could
not help thinking that for any one to go to heaven was stranger than to
drive to Dipwell, and I had this idea when my father was clasping me
in his arms; but he melted it like snow off the fields. He came with
postillions in advance of him wearing crape rosettes, as did the horses.
We were in the cricket-field, where Dipwell was playing its first match
of the season, and a Dipwell lad, furious to see the elevens commit such
a breach of the rules and decency as to troop away while the game was
hot, and surround my father, flung the cricket-ball into the midst and
hit two or three of the men hard. My father had to shield him from
the consequences. He said he liked that boy; and he pleaded for him so
winningly and funnily that the man who was hurt most laughed loudest.

Standing up in the carriage, and holding me by the hand, he addressed
them by their names: ‘Sweetwinter, I thank you for your attention to my
son; and you, Thribble; and you, my man; and you, Baker; Rippengale,
and you; and you, Jupp’; as if he knew them personally. It was true he
nodded at random. Then he delivered a short speech, and named himself a
regular subscriber to their innocent pleasures. He gave them money,
and scattered silver coin among the boys and girls, and praised John
Thresher, and Martha, his wife, for their care of me, and pointing to
the chimneys of the farm, said that the house there was holy to him from
henceforth, and he should visit it annually if possible, but always in
the month of May, and in the shape of his subscription, as certain as
the cowslip. The men, after their fit of cheering, appeared unwilling to
recommence their play, so he alighted and delivered the first ball, and
then walked away with my hand in his, saying:

‘Yes, my son, we will return to them tenfold what they have done for
you. The eleventh day of May shall be a day of pleasure for Dipwell
while I last, and you will keep it in memory of me when I am gone. And
now to see the bed you have slept in.’

Martha Thresher showed him the bed, showed him flowers I had planted,
and a Spanish chestnut tree just peeping.

‘Ha!’ said he, beaming at every fresh sight of my doings: ‘madam, I am
your life-long debtor and friend!’ He kissed her on the cheek.

John Thresher cried out: ‘Why, dame, you trembles like a maid.’

She spoke very faintly, and was red in the face up to the time of our
departure. John stood like a soldier. We drove away from a cheering
crowd of cricketers and farm-labourers, as if discharged from a great
gun. ‘A royal salvo!’ said my father, and asked me earnestly whether I
had forgotten to reward and take a particular farewell of any one of
my friends. I told him I had forgotten no one, and thought it was true,
until on our way up the sandy lane, which offered us a last close view
of the old wall-flower farm front, I saw little Mabel Sweetwinter, often
my playfellow and bedfellow, a curly-headed girl, who would have
danced on Sunday for a fairing, and eaten gingerbread nuts during a
ghost-story. She was sitting by a furze-bush in flower, cherishing in
her lap a lamb that had been worried. She looked half up at me, and kept
looking so, but would not nod. Then good-bye, thought I, and remembered
her look when I had forgotten that of all the others.



CHAPTER IV. I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR

Though I had not previously seen a postillion in my life, I gazed on the
pair bobbing regularly on their horses before me, without a thought upon
the marvel of their sudden apparition and connection with my fortunes.
I could not tire of hearing the pleasant music of the many feet at the
trot, and tried to explain to my father that the men going up and down
made it like a piano that played of itself. He laughed and kissed me; he
remembered having once shown me the inside of a piano when the keys
were knocked. My love for him as we drove into London had a recognized
footing: I perceived that he was my best friend and only true companion,
besides his being my hero. The wicked men who had parted us were no
longer able to do harm, he said. I forgot, in my gladness at their
defeat, to ask what had become of Shylock’s descendant.

Mrs. Waddy welcomed us when we alighted. Do not imagine that it was at
the door of her old house. It was in a wide street opening on a splendid
square, and pillars were before the houses, and inside there was the
enchantment of a little fountain playing thin as whipcord, among ferns,
in a rock-basin under a window that glowed with kings of England, copied
from boys’ history books. All the servants were drawn up in the hall to
do homage to me. They seemed less real and living than the wonder of
the sweet-smelling chairs, the birds, and the elegant dogs. Richest of
treats, a monkey was introduced to me. ‘It ‘s your papa’s whim,’ Mrs.
Waddy said, resignedly; ‘he says he must have his jester. Indeed it is
no joke to me.’

Yet she smiled happily, though her voice was melancholy. From her I now
learnt that my name was Richmond Roy, and not Harry Richmond. I said,
‘Very well,’ for I was used to change. Everybody in the house wore a
happy expression of countenance, except the monkey, who was too busy.
As we mounted the stairs I saw more kings of England painted on the
back-windows. Mrs. Waddy said: ‘It is considered to give a monarchical
effect,’--she coughed modestly after the long word, and pursued: ‘as
it should.’ I insisted upon going to the top floor, where I expected to
find William the Conqueror, and found him; but that strong connecting
link between John Thresher and me presented himself only to carry my
recollections of the Dipwell of yesterday as far back into the past as
the old Norman days.

‘And down go all the kings, downstairs,’ I said, surveying them
consecutively.

‘Yes,’ she replied, in a tone that might lead one to think it their
lamentable fate. ‘And did the people look at you as you drove along
through the streets, Master Richmond?’

I said ‘Yes,’ in turn; and then we left off answering, but questioned
one another, which is a quicker way of getting at facts; I know it is
with boys and women. Mrs. Waddy cared much less to hear of Dipwell
and its inhabitants than of the sensation created everywhere by our
equipage. I noticed that when her voice was not melancholy her face was.
She showed me a beautiful little pink bed, having a crown over it, in a
room opening to my father’s. Twenty thousand magnificent dreams seemed
to flash their golden doors when I knew that the bed was mine. I thought
it almost as nice as a place by my father’s side.

‘Don’t you like it, Mrs. Waddy?’ I said.

She smiled and sighed. ‘Like it? Oh! yes, my dear, to be sure I do. I
only hope it won’t vanish.’ She simpered and looked sad.

I had too many distractions, or I should have asked her whether my
amazing and delightful new home had ever shown symptoms of vanishing; it
appeared to me, judging from my experience, that nothing moved violently
except myself, and my principal concern was lest any one should carry me
away at a moment’s notice. In the evening I was introduced to a company
of gentlemen, who were drinking wine after dinner with my father. They
clapped their hands and laughed immoderately on my telling them that I
thought those kings of England who could not find room on the windows
must have gone down to the cellars.

‘They are going,’ my father said. He drank off a glassful of wine and
sighed prodigiously. ‘They are going, gentlemen, going there, like good
wine, like old Port, which they tell us is going also. Favour me by
drinking to the health of Richmond Roy the younger.’

They drank to me heartily, but my father had fallen mournful before I
left the room.

Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French
from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed
to be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and
lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a
fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take
down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my
mornings. My father told the man who instructed me in the art of
self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession. I
wrestled ten minutes every day with this man’s son, and was regularly
thrown. On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in
the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and
was much looked at. ‘It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and
persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,’ he said. We
used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and the
House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay of
British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William
Pitt (our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and
Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.

My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage. ‘Now I
have you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,’ he said. I
wished to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some
other place. He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth
would do it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth
in perfect trust. We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul’s and
Westminster Abbey as of a day that had its charm. Our pew among a
fashionable congregation pleased him better. The pew-opener curtseyed
to none as she did to him. For my part, I missed the monuments and the
chants, and something besides that had gone--I knew not what. At the
first indication of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after
making me stand with my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like a
dragon in a piece of tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and try
to be the same that he had been in Mrs. Waddy’s lodgings. Then we read
the Arabian Nights together, or, rather, he read them to me, often
acting out the incidents as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to
perform a duty was the fatal forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the
cream-tarts; if my father subjected me to an interrogation concerning my
lessons, he was the dread African magician to whom must be surrendered
my acquisition of the ring and the musty old lamp. We were quite in the
habit of meeting fair Persians. He would frequently ejaculate that he
resembled the Three Calendars in more respects than one. To divert me
during my recovery from measles, he one day hired an actor in a theatre,
and put a cloth round his neck, and seated him in a chair, rubbed his
chin with soap, and played the part of the Barber over him, and I have
never laughed so much in my life. Poor Mrs. Waddy got her hands at her
sides, and kept on gasping, ‘Oh, sir! oh!’ while the Barber hurried away
from the half-shaved young man to consult his pretended astrolabe in
the next room, where we heard him shouting the sun’s altitude, and
consulting its willingness for the impatient young man to be further
shaved; and back he came, seeming refreshed to have learnt the sun’s
favourable opinion, and gabbling at an immense rate, full of barber’s
business. The servants were allowed to be spectators; but as soon as
the young man was shaved, my father dismissed them with the tone of a
master. No wonder they loved him. Mrs. Waddy asked who could help it?

I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of
marrying again; it added a curious romantic tenderness to my adoration
of him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world. To
have his hand in mine was my delight. Then it was that I could think
earnestly of Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I
would not have minded his marrying. My favourite dream was to see him
shooting an arrow in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because
of not finding his arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to,
and wandering after it till he passed out of green fields to grassy
rocks, and to a stony desert, where at last he found his arrow at an
enormous distance from the shooting line, and there was the desert all
about him, and the sweetest fairy ever imagined going to show herself to
him in the ground under his feet. In his absence I really hungered for
him, and was jealous.

During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the Continent,
where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple; and my father
directed our movements through the aid of a telescope, which told us
the titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the cities
and cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and the
castles-they were little more to me than an animated book of geography,
opening and shutting at random; and travelling from place to place must
have seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I was generally
as quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace between any two
emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young lady. My father made
friends fast on our travels: her parents were among the number, and she
fell in love with me and enjoyed having the name of Peribanou, which I
bestowed on her for her delicious talk of the blue and red-striped posts
that would spout up fountains of pearls if they were plucked from their
beds, and the palaces that had flown out of the farthest corners of
the world, and the city that would some night or other vanish suddenly,
leaving bare sea-ripple to say ‘Where? where?’ as they rolled over.
I would have seen her marry my father happily. She was like rest and
dreams to me, soft sea and pearls. We entered into an arrangement to
correspond for life. Her name was Clara Goodwin; she requested me to go
always to the Horse Guards to discover in what part of the world Colonel
Goodwin might be serving when I wanted to write to her. I, in return,
could give no permanent address, so I related my history from the
beginning. ‘To write to you would be the same as writing to a river,’
she said; and insisted that I should drop the odious name of Roy when
I grew a man. My father quarrelled with Colonel Goodwin. Months after
I felt as if I had only just been torn from Clara, but she stood in a
mist, irrecoverably distant. I had no other friend.

Twelve dozen of splendid Burgundy were the fruit of our tour, to be laid
down at Dipwell farm for my arrival at my majority, when I should be a
legal man, embarked in my own ship, as my father said. I did not taste
the wine. ‘Porter for me that day, please God!’ cried Mrs. Waddy, who
did. My father eyed her with pity, and ordered her to send the wine
down to Dipwell, which was done. He took me between his knees, and said
impressively, ‘Now, Richie, twelve dozen of the best that man can drink
await you at the gates of manhood. Few fathers can say that to their
sons, my boy! If we drink it together, blessings on the day! If I’m
gone, Richie, shut up in the long box,’ his voice shook, and he added,
‘gone to Peribanou underneath, you know, remember that your dada saw
that the wine was a good vintage, and bought it and had it bottled in
his own presence while you were asleep in the Emperor’s room in the fine
old Burgundy city, and swore that, whatever came to them both, his son
should drink the wine of princes on the day of his majority.’ Here my
father’s tone was highly exalted, and he sat in a great flush.

I promised him I would bend my steps toward Dipwell to be there on my
twenty-first birthday, and he pledged himself to be there in spirit at
least, bodily if possible. We sealed the subject with some tears.
He often talked of commissioning a poet to compose verses about that
wonderful coming day at Dipwell. The thought of the day in store for
us sent me strutting as though I had been in the presence of my
drill-master. Mrs. Waddy, however, grew extremely melancholy at the
mention of it.

‘Lord only knows where we shall all be by that time!’ she sighed.

‘She is a dewy woman,’ said my father, disdainfully They appeared always
to be at variance, notwithstanding her absolute devotion to him. My
father threatened to have her married to somebody immediately if she
afflicted him with what he called her Waddyism. She had got the habit
of exclaiming at the end of her remarks, ‘No matter; our clock strikes
soon!’ in a way that communicated to me an obscure idea of a door
going to open unexpectedly in one of the walls, and conduct us, by
subterranean passages, into a new country. My father’s method of
rebuking her anxious nature was to summon his cook, the funniest of
Frenchmen, Monsieur Alphonse, and issue orders for a succession of six
dinner-parties. ‘And now, ma’am, you have occupation for your mind,’ he
would say.

To judge by the instantaneous composure of her whole appearance, he did
produce a temporary abatement of her malady. The good soul bustled out
of the room in attendance upon M. Alphonse, and never complained while
the dinners lasted, but it was whispered that she had fits in the upper
part of the house. No sooner did my father hear the rumour than he
accused her to her face of this enormity, telling her that he was
determined to effect a permanent cure, even though she should drive him
to unlimited expense. We had a Ball party and an Aladdin supper, and for
a fortnight my father hired postillions; we flashed through London. My
father backed a horse to run in the races on Epsom Downs named Prince
Royal, only for the reason that his name was Prince Royal, and the horse
won, which was, he said, a proof to me that in our country it was common
prudence to stick to Royalty; and he bade me note that if he went in a
carriage and two, he was comparatively unnoticed, whereas when he was
beheld in a carriage and four, with postillions, at a glance from him
the country people tugged their forelocks, and would like, if he would
let them, to kiss his hand. ‘We will try the scarlet livery on one of
our drives, Richie,’ said he. Mrs. Waddy heard him. ‘It is unlawful,
sir,’ she said. ‘For whom, ma’am?’ asked my father. ‘None but Royal...’
she was explaining, but stopped, for he showed her an awful frown, and
she cried so that my heart ached for her. My father went out to order
the livery on the spot. He was very excited. Then it was that Mrs.
Waddy, embracing me, said, ‘My dear, my own Master Richmond, my little
Harry, prepare your poor child’s heart for evil days.’ I construed
her unintelligible speech as an attack upon my father, and abused her
violently.

While I was in this state of wrathful championship, the hall-door was
opened. I ran out and caught sight of my aunt Dorothy, in company with
old Mr. Bannerbridge. I was kissed and hugged for I know not how long,
until the smell of Riversley took entire possession of me, and my old
home seemed nearer than the one I lived in; but my aunt, seeing tears
on my cheeks, asked me what was my cause of sorrow. In a moment I poured
out a flood of complaints against Mrs. Waddy for vexing my father. When
she heard of the scarlet livery, my aunt lifted her hands. ‘The man is
near the end of his wits and his money together,’ said Mr. Bannerbridge;
and she said to me, ‘My darling Harry will come back to his own nice
little room, and see his grandpapa soon, won’t you, my pet? All is
ready for him there as it used to be, except poor mama. “Kiss my boy,
my Harry--Harry Richmond.” Those were her last words on her death-bed,
before she went to God, Harry, my own! There is Sampson the pony,
and Harry’s dog Prince, and his lamb Daisy, grown a sheep, and the
ploughboy, Dick, with the big boots.’ Much more sweet talk of the same
current that made my face cloudy and bright, and filled me with desire
for Riversley, to see my mother’s grave and my friends.

Aunt Dorothy looked at me. ‘Come now,’ she said; ‘come with me, Harry.’
Her trembling seized on me like a fire. I said, ‘Yes,’ though my heart
sank as if I had lost my father with the word. She caught me in her arms
tight, murmuring, ‘And dry our tears and make our house laugh. Oh! since
the night that Harry went..... And I am now Harry’s mama, he has me.’

I looked on her forehead for the wreath of white flowers my mother used
to wear, and thought of my father’s letter with the prayer written on
the black-bordered page. I said I would go, but my joy in going was
gone. We were stopped in the doorway by Mrs. Waddy. Nothing would tempt
her to surrender me. Mr. Bannerbridge tried reasoning with her, and, as
he said, put the case, which seemed to have perched on his forefinger.
He talked of my prospects, of my sole chance of being educated morally
and virtuously as became the grandson of an English gentleman of a good
old family, and of my father having spent my mother’s estate, and of
the danger of his doing so with mine, and of religious duty and the
awfulness of the position Mrs. Waddy stood in. He certainly subdued me
to very silent breathing, but did not affect me as my aunt Dorothy’s
picturing of Riversley had done; and when Mrs. Waddy, reduced to an
apparent submissiveness, addressed me piteously, ‘Master Richmond, would
you leave papa?’ I cried out, ‘No, no, never leave my papa,’ and
twisted away from my aunt’s keeping. My father’s arrival caused me to
be withdrawn, but I heard his offer of his hospitality and all that was
his; and subsequently there was loud talking on his part. I was kissed
by my aunt before she went. She whispered, ‘Come to us when you
are free; think of us when you pray.’ She was full of tears. Mr.
Bannerbridge patted my head.

The door closed on them and I thought it was a vision that had passed.
But now my father set my heart panting with questions as to the terrible
possibility of us two ever being separated. In some way he painted my
grandfather so black that I declared earnestly I would rather die than
go to Riversley; I would never utter the name of the place where there
was evil speaking of the one I loved dearest. ‘Do not, my son,’ he said
solemnly, ‘or it parts us two.’ I repeated after him, ‘I am a Roy and
not a Beltham.’ It was enough to hear that insult and shame had been
cast on him at Riversley for me to hate the name of the place. We cried
and then laughed together, and I must have delivered myself with amazing
eloquence, for my father held me at arms’ length and said, ‘Richie, the
notion of training you for a General commandership of the British army
is a good one, but if you have got the winning tongue, the woolsack will
do as well for a whisper in the ear of the throne. That is our aim, my
son. We say,--you will not acknowledge our birth, you shall acknowledge
our worth.’ He complained bitterly of my aunt Dorothy bringing a lawyer
to our house. The sins of Mrs. Waddy were forgiven her, owing to her
noble resistance to the legal gentleman’s seductive speech. So I walked
up and down stairs with the kings of England looking at me out of the
coloured windows quietly for a week; and then two ugly men entered the
house, causing me to suffer a fearful oppression, though my father was
exceedingly kind to them and had beds provided for them, saying that
they were very old retainers of his.

But the next day our scarlet livery appeared. After exacting particular
attention to his commands, my father quitted Mrs. Waddy, and we mounted
the carriage, laughing at her deplorable eyes and prim lips, which he
imitated for my amusement. ‘A load is off my head,’ he remarked. He
asked me if splendour did not fatigue me also. I caught the answer from
his face and replied that it did, and that I should like to go right on
to Dipwell ‘The Burgundy sleeps safe there,’ said my father, and thought
over it. We had an extraordinary day. People stood fast to gaze at
us; in the country some pulled off their hats and set up a cheer. The
landlords of the inns where we baited remained bare-headed until we
started afresh, and I, according to my father’s example, bowed and
lifted my cap gravely to persons saluting us along the roads. Nor did
I seek to know the reason for this excess of respectfulness; I was
beginning to take to it naturally. At the end of a dusty high-road,
where it descends the hill into a town, we drew up close by a high red
wall, behind which I heard boys shouting at play. We went among them,
accompanied by their master. My father tipped the head boy for the
benefit of the school, and following lunch with the master and his
daughter, to whom I gave a kiss at her request, a half-holiday was
granted to the boys in my name. How they cheered! The young lady saw my
delight, and held me at the window while my father talked with hers; and
for a long time after I beheld them in imagination talking: that is to
say, my father issuing his instructions and Mr. Rippenger receiving
them like a pliant hodman; for the result of it was that two days later,
without seeing my kings of England, my home again, or London, I was
Julia Rippenger’s intimate friend and the youngest pupil of the school.
My father told me subsequently that we slept at an hotel those two
nights intervening. Memory transplants me from the coach and scarlet
livery straight to my place of imprisonment.



CHAPTER V. I MAKE A DEAR FRIEND

Heriot was the name of the head boy of the school. Boddy was the name of
one of the ushers. They were both in love with Julia Rippenger. It
was my fortune to outrun them in her favour for a considerable period,
during which time, though I had ceased to live in state, and was wearing
out my suits of velvet, and had neither visit nor letter from my father,
I was in tolerable bliss. Julia’s kisses were showered on me for almost
anything I said or did, but her admiration of heroism and daring was
so fervent that I was in no greater danger of becoming effeminate
than Achilles when he wore girl’s clothes. She was seventeen, an age
bewitching for boys to look up to and men to look down on. The puzzle
of the school was how to account for her close relationship to old
Rippenger. Such an apple on such a crab-tree seemed monstrous. Heriot
said that he hoped Boddy would marry old Rippenger’s real daughter, and,
said he, that’s birch-twigs. I related his sparkling speech to Julia,
who laughed, accusing him, however, of impudence. She let me see a
portrait of her dead mother, an Irish lady raising dark eyelashes,
whom she resembled. I talked of the portrait to Heriot, and as I had
privileges accorded to none of the other boys and could go to her at any
hour of the day after lessons, he made me beg for him to have a sight
of it. She considered awhile, but refused. On hearing of the unkind
refusal, Heriot stuck his hands into his pockets and gave up cricketing.
We saw him leaning against a wall in full view of her window, while the
boys crowded round him trying to get him to practise, a school-match of
an important character coming off with a rival academy; and it was only
through fear of our school being beaten if she did not relent that
Julia handed me the portrait, charging me solemnly to bring it back.
I promised, of course. Heriot went into his favourite corner of the
playground, and there looked at it and kissed it, and then buttoned his
jacket over it tight, growling when I asked him to return it. Julia grew
frightened. She sent me with numbers of petitions to him.

‘Look here, young un,’ said Heriot; ‘you’re a good little fellow, and I
like you, but just tell her I believe in nothing but handwriting, and if
she writes to me for it humbly and nicely she shall have it back. Say I
only want to get a copy taken by a first-rate painter.’

Julia shed tears at his cruelty, called him cruel, wicked, false to his
word. She wrote, but the letter did not please him, and his reply was
scornful. At prayers morning and evening, it was pitiful to observe
her glance of entreaty and her downfallen eyelashes. I guessed that in
Heriot’s letters to her he wanted to make her confess something, which
she would not do. ‘Now I write to him no more; let him know it, my
darling,’ she said, and the consequence of Heriot’s ungrateful obstinacy
was that we all beheld her, at the ceremony of the consecration of the
new church, place her hand on Mr. Boddy’s arm and allow him to lead her
about. Heriot kept his eyes on them; his mouth was sharp, and his
arms stiff by his sides. I was the bearer of a long letter to her that
evening. She tore it to pieces without reading it. Next day Heriot
walked slowly past Mr. Boddy holding the portrait in his hands. The
usher called to him!

‘What have you there, Heriot?’

My hero stared. ‘Only a family portrait,’ he answered, thrusting it safe
in his pocket and fixing his gaze on Julia’s window.

‘Permit me to look at it,’ said Mr. Boddy.

‘Permit me to decline to let you,’ said Heriot.

‘Look at me, sir,’ cried Boddy.

‘I prefer to look elsewhere, sir,’ replied Heriot, and there was Julia
visible at her window.

‘I asked you, sir, civilly,’ quoth Boddy, ‘for permission to look,--I
used the word intentionally; I say I asked you for permission...’

‘No, you didn’t,’ Heriot retorted, quite cool; ‘inferentially you did;
but you did not use the word permission.’

‘And you turned upon me impudently,’ pursued Boddy, whose colour was
thunder: ‘you quibbled, sir; you prevaricated; you concealed what you
were carrying...’

‘Am carrying,’ Heriot corrected his tense; ‘and mean to, in spite of
every Boddy,’ he murmured audibly.

‘Like a rascal detected in an act of felony,’ roared Boddy, ‘you
concealed it, sir...’

‘Conceal it, sir.’

‘And I demand, in obedience to my duty, that you instantly exhibit it
for my inspection, now, here, at once; no parleying; unbutton, or I call
Mr. Rippenger to compel you.’

I was standing close by my brave Heriot, rather trembling, studious of
his manfulness though I was. His left foot was firmly in advance, as he
said, just in the manner to start an usher furious:

‘I concealed it, I conceal it; I was carrying it, I carry it: you demand
that I exhibit for your inspection what I mean no Boddy to see? I have
to assure you respectfully, sir, that family portraits are sacred things
with the sons of gentlemen. Here, Richie, off!’

I found the portrait in my hand, and Heriot between me and the usher,
in the attitude of a fellow keeping another out of his home at
prisoner’s-base. He had spied Mr. Rippenger’s head at the playground
gate. I had just time to see Heriot and the usher in collision before
I ran through the gate and into Julia’s arms in her garden, whither the
dreadful prospect of an approaching catastrophe had attracted her.

Heriot was merely reported guilty of insolence. He took his five hundred
lines of Virgil with his usual sarcastic dignity: all he said to Mr.
Rippenger was, ‘Let it be about Dido, sir,’ which set several of the
boys upon Dido’s history, but Heriot was condemned to the battles with
Turnus. My share in this event secured Heriot’s friendship to me without
costing me the slightest inconvenience. ‘Papa would never punish you,’
Julia said; and I felt my rank. Nor was it wonderful I should when Mr.
Rippenger was constantly speaking of my father’s magnificence in
my presence before company. Allowed to draw on him largely for
pocket-money, I maintained my father’s princely reputation in the
school. At times, especially when the holidays arrived and I was left
alone with Julia, I had fits of mournfulness, and almost thought the
boys happier than I was. Going home began to seem an unattainable thing
to me. Having a father, too, a regular father, instead of a dazzling
angel that appeared at intervals, I considered a benefaction, in its
way, some recompense to the boys, for their not possessing one like
mine. My anxiety was relieved by my writing letters to my father,
addressed to the care of Miss Julia Rippenger, and posting them in her
work-basket. She favoured me with very funny replies, signed, ‘Your own
ever-loving Papa,’ about his being engaged killing Bengal tigers and
capturing white elephants, a noble occupation that gave me exciting and
consolatory dreams of him.

We had at last a real letter of his, dated from a foreign city; but he
mentioned nothing of coming to me. I understood that Mr. Rippenger was
disappointed with it.

Gradually a kind of cloud stole over me. I no longer liked to ask for
pocket-money; I was clad in a suit of plain cloth; I was banished from
the parlour, and only on Sunday was I permitted to go to Julia. I ceased
to live in myself. Through the whole course of lessons, at play-time, in
my bed, and round to morning bell, I was hunting my father in an unknown
country, generally with the sun setting before me: I ran out of a wood
almost into a brook to see it sink as if I had again lost sight of
him, and then a sense of darkness brought me back to my natural
consciousness, without afflicting me much, but astonishing me. Why was
I away from him? I could repeat my lessons in the midst of these dreams
quite fairly; it was the awakening among the circle of the boys that
made me falter during a recital and ask myself why I was there and he
absent? They had given over speculating on another holiday and treat
from my father; yet he had produced such an impression in the school
that even when I had descended to the level of a total equality with
them, they continued to have some consideration for me. I was able to
talk of foreign cities and could tell stories, and I was, besides,
under the immediate protection of Heriot. But now the shadow of a great
calamity fell on me, for my dear Heriot announced his intention of
leaving the school next half.

‘I can’t stand being prayed at, morning and evening, by a fellow who
hasn’t the pluck to strike me like a man,’ he said. Mr. Rippenger had
the habit of signalizing offenders, in his public prayers, as boys whose
hearts he wished to be turned from callousness. He perpetually suspected
plots; and to hear him allude to some deep, long-hatched school
conspiracy while we knelt motionless on the forms, and fetch a big
breath to bring out, ‘May the heart of Walter Heriot be turned and
he comprehend the multitudinous blessings,’ etc., was intensely
distressing. Together with Walter Heriot, Andrew Saddlebank, our best
bowler, the drollest fellow in the world, John Salter, and little Gus
Temple, were oftenest cited. They declared that they invariably uttered
‘Amen,’ as Heriot did, but we none of us heard this defiant murmur of
assent from their lips. Heriot pronounced it clearly and cheerfully,
causing Julia’s figure to shrink as she knelt with her face in the chair
hard by her father’s desk-pulpit. I received the hearty congratulations
of my comrades for singing out ‘Amen’ louder than Heriot, like
a chorister, though not in so prolonged a note, on hearing to my
stupefaction Mr. Rippenger implore that the heart of ‘him we know as
Richmond Roy’ might be turned. I did it spontaneously. Mr. Rippenger
gazed at me in descending from his desk; Julia, too, looking grieved.
For my part, I exulted in having done a thing that gave me a likeness to
Heriot.

‘Little Richmond, you’re a little hero,’ he said, caressing me. ‘I saw
old Rippenger whisper to that beast, Boddy. Never mind; they won’t hurt
you as long as I’m here. Grow tough, that’s what you’ve got to do.
I’d like to see you horsed, only to see whether you’re game to take it
without wincing--if it didn’t hurt you much, little lad.’

He hugged me up to him.

‘I’d take anything for you, Heriot,’ said I.

‘All right,’ he answered, never meaning me to suffer on his account. He
had an inimitable manner of sweet speaking that endeared him to younger
boys capable of appreciating it, with the supernatural power of music.
It endeared him, I suppose, to young women also. Julia repeated his
phrases, as for instance, ‘Silly boy, silly boy,’ spoken with a wave of
his hand, when a little fellow thanked him for a kindness. She was
angry at his approval of what she called my defiance of her father, and
insisted that I was the catspaw of one of Heriot’s plots to vex him.
‘Tell Heriot you have my command to say you belong to me and must not
be misled,’ she said. His answer was that he wanted it in writing. She
requested him to deliver up her previous letters. Thereupon he charged
me with a lengthy epistle, which plunged us into boiling water. Mr.
Boddy sat in the schoolroom while Heriot’s pen was at work, on the wet
Sunday afternoon. His keen little eyes were busy in his flat bird’s head
all the time Heriot continued writing. He saw no more than that Heriot
gave me a book; but as I was marching away to Julia he called to know
where I was going.

‘To Miss Rippenger,’ I replied.

‘What have you there?’

‘A book, sir.’

‘Show me the book.’

I stood fast.

‘It ‘s a book I have lent him, sir,’ said Heriot, rising. ‘I shall see
if it’s a fit book for a young boy,’ said Boddy; and before Heriot
could interpose, he had knocked the book on the floor, and out fell
the letter. Both sprang down to seize it: their heads encountered, but
Heriot had the quicker hand; he caught the letter, and cried ‘Off!’ to
me, as on another occasion. This time, however, he was not between me
and the usher. I was seized by the collar, and shakes roughly.

‘You will now understand that you are on a footing with the rest of
the boys, you Roy,’ said Boddy. ‘Little scoundrelly spoilt urchins,
upsetting the discipline of the school, won’t do here. Heriot, here is
your book. I regret,’ he added, sneering, ‘that a leaf is torn.’

‘I regret, sir, that the poor boy was so savagely handled,’ said Heriot.

He was warned to avoid insolence.

‘Oh, as much Virgil as you like,’ Heriot retorted; ‘I know him by
heart.’

It was past the hour of my customary visit to Julia, and she came to
discover the reason of my delay. Boddy stood up to explain. Heriot
went forward, saying, ‘I think I’m the one who ought to speak, Miss
Rippenger. The fact is, I hear from little Roy that you are fond of
tales of Indian adventure, and I gave him a book for you to read, if
you like it. Mr. Boddy objected, and treated the youngster rather
rigorously. It must have been quite a misunderstanding on his part. Here
is the book it’s extremely amusing.’

Julia blushed very red. She accepted the book with a soft murmur, and
the sallow usher had not a word.

‘Stay,’ said Heriot. ‘I took the liberty to write some notes. My father
is an Indian officer, you know, and some of the terms in the book are
difficult without notes. Richie, hand that paper. Here they are, Miss
Rippenger, if you’ll be so kind as to place them in the book.’

I was hoping with all my might that she would not deny him. She did, and
my heart sank.

‘Oh, I can read it without notes,’ she said, cheerfully.

After that, I listened with indifference to her petition to Boddy that
I might be allowed to accompany her, and was not at all chagrined by
his refusal. She laid down the book, saying that I could bring it to her
when I was out of disgrace.

In the evening we walked in the playground, where Heriot asked me to do
a brave thing, which he would never forget. This was that I should take
a sharp run right past Boddy, who was pacing up and down before the gate
leading into Julia’s garden, and force her to receive the letter. I went
bounding like a ball. The usher, suspecting only that I hurried to speak
to him, let me see how indignant he was with my behaviour by striding
all the faster as I drew near, and so he passed the gate, and I rushed
in. I had just time to say to Julia, ‘Hide it, or I’m in such a scrape.’

The next minute she was addressing my enemy:

‘Surely you would not punish him because he loves me?’ and he, though he
spoke of insubordination, merited chastisement; and other usher phrases,
seemed to melt, and I had what I believe was a primary conception of the
power of woman. She led him to talk in the gentlest way possible of how
the rain had refreshed her flowers, and of this and that poor rose.

I could think of nothing but the darling letter, which had flashed out
of sight as a rabbit pops into burrows. Boddy departed with a rose.

‘Ah, Richie,’ she said, ‘I have to pay to have you with me now.’

We walked to the summer-house, where she read Heriot’s letter through.
‘But he is a boy! How old is Heriot? He is not so old as I am!’

These were her words, and she read the letter anew, and read it again
after she had placed it in her bosom, I meanwhile pouring out praises of
Heriot.

‘You speak of him as if you were in love with him, Richmond,’ she said.

‘And I do love him,’ I answered.

‘Not with me?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I do love you too, if you will not make him angry.’

‘But do you know what it is he wants of me?’

I guessed: ‘Yes; he wants you to let him sit close to you for half an
hour.’

She said that he sat very near her in church.

‘Ah,’ said I, ‘but he mustn’t interrupt the sermon.’

She laughed, and mouthed me over with laughing kisses. ‘There’s very
little he hasn’t daring enough for!’

We talked of his courage.

‘Is he good as well?’ said Julia, more to herself than to me; but I sang
out,

‘Good! Oh, so kind!’

This appeared to convince her.

‘Very generous to you and every one, is he not?’ she said; and from that
moment was all questions concerning his kind treatment of the boys, and
as to their looking up to him.

I quitted her, taking her message to Heriot: ‘You may tell him--tell him
that I can’t write.’

Heriot frowned on hearing me repeat it.

‘Humph!’ he went, and was bright in a twinkling: ‘that means she’ll
come!’ He smacked his hands together, grew black, and asked, ‘Did she
give that beast Boddy a rose?’

I had to confess she did; and feeling a twinge of my treason to her,
felt hers to Heriot.

‘Humph!’ he went; ‘she shall suffer for that.’

All this was like music going on until the curtain should lift and
reveal my father to me.

There was soon a secret to be read in Heriot’s face for one who loved
it as I did. Julia’s betrayed nothing. I was not taken into their
confidence, and luckily not; otherwise I fear I should have served
them ill, I was so poor a dissembler and was so hotly plied with
interrogations by the suspicious usher. I felt sure that Heriot and
Julia met. His eyes were on her all through prayer-time, and hers
wandered over the boys’ heads till they rested on him, when they gave a
short flutter and dropped, like a bird shot dead. The boys must have
had some knowledge that love was busy in their midst, for they spoke of
Heriot and Julia as a jolly couple, and of Boddy as one meaning to play
the part of old Nick the first opportunity. She was kinder to them than
ever. It was not a new thing that she should send in cakes of her own
making, but it was extraordinary that we should get these thoughtful
presents as often as once a fortnight, and it became usual to hear a boy
exclaim, either among a knot of fellows or to himself, ‘By jingo, she is
a pretty girl!’ on her passing out of the room, and sometimes entirely
of his own idea. I am persuaded that if she had consented to marry
Boddy, the boys would have been seriously disposed to conspire to jump
up in the church and forbid the banns. We should have preferred to hand
her to the junior usher, Catman, of whom the rumour ran in the school
that he once drank a bottle of wine and was sick after it, and he was
therefore a weak creature to our minds; the truth of the rumour being
confirmed by his pale complexion. That we would have handed our blooming
princess to him was full proof of our abhorrence of Boddy. I might have
thought with the other boys that she was growing prettier, only I never
could imagine her so delicious as when she smiled at my father.

The consequence of the enlistment of the whole school in Heriot’s
interests was that at cricket-matches, picnics on the hills, and
boating on the canal, Mr. Boddy was begirt with spies, and little Temple
reported to Heriot a conversation that he, lying hidden in tall grass,
had heard between Boddy and Julia. Boddy asked her to take private
lessons in French from him. Heriot listened to the monstrous tale as he
was on the point of entering Julia’s boat, where Boddy sat beside her,
and Heriot rowed stroke-oar. He dipped his blade, and said, loud enough
to be heard by me in Catman’s boat,

‘Do you think French useful in a military education, sir?’

And Boddy said, ‘Yes, of course it is.’

Says Heriot, ‘Then I think I shall take lessons.’

Boddy told him he was taking lessons in the school.

‘Oh!’ says Heriot, ‘I mean private lessons’; and here he repeated one
of Temple’s pieces of communication: ‘so much more can be imparted in a
private lesson!’

Boddy sprang half up from his seat. ‘Row, sir, and don’t talk,’ he
growled.

‘Sit, sir, and don’t dance in the boat, if you please, or the lady will
be overset,’ said Heriot.

Julia requested to be allowed to land and walk home. Boddy caught the
rudder lines and leapt on the bank to hand her out; then all the boys
in her boat and in Catman’s shouted, ‘Miss Julia! dear Miss Julia, don’t
leave us!’ and we heard wheedling voices: ‘Don’t go off with him alone!’
Julia bade us behave well or she would not be able to come out with us.
At her entreaty Boddy stepped back to his post, and the two boats went
forward like swans that have done ruffling their feathers.

The boys were exceedingly disappointed that no catastrophe followed
the events of the day. Heriot, they thought, might have upset the boat,
saved Julia, and drowned Boddy, and given us a feast of pleasurable
excitement: instead of which Boddy lived to harass us with his
tyrannical impositions and spiteful slaps, and it was to him, not to our
Heriot, that Julia was most gracious. Some of us discussed her conduct.

‘She’s a coquette,’ said little Temple. I went off to the French
dictionary.

‘Is Julia Rippenger a coquette, Heriot?’ I asked him.

‘Keep girls out of your heads, you little fellows,’ said he, dealing me
a smart thump.

‘Is a coquette a nasty girl?’ I persisted.

‘No, a nice one, as it happens,’ was his answer.

My only feeling was jealousy of the superior knowledge of the sex
possessed by Temple, for I could not fathom the meaning of coquette;
but he had sisters. Temple and I walked the grounds together, mutually
declaring how much we would forfeit for Heriot’s sake. By this time my
Sunday visits to Julia had been interdicted: I was plunged, as it
were, in the pit of the school, and my dreams of my father were losing
distinctness. A series of boxes on the ears from Boddy began to astound
and transform me. Mr. Rippenger, too, threatened me with carvings,
though my offences were slight. ‘Yes,’ said Temple and I, in chorus,
‘but you daren’t strike Heriot!’ This was our consolation, and the
sentiment of the school. Fancy, then, our amazement to behold him
laying the cane on Heriot’s shoulders as fiercely as he could, and Boddy
seconding him. The scene was terrible. We were all at our desks doing
evening tasks for the morrow, a great matchday at cricket, Boddy
watching over us, and bellowing, ‘Silence at your work, you lazy
fellows, if you want lessons to be finished at ten in the morning!’
A noise came growing up to us from below, up the stairs from the
wet-weather shed, and Heriot burst into the room, old Rippenger after
him, panting.

‘Mr. Boddy, you were right,’ he cried, ‘I find him a prowler, breaking
all rules of discipline. A perverted, impudent rascal! An example shall
be set to my school, sir. We have been falling lax. What! I find
the puppy in my garden whistling--he confesses--for one of my
servants--here, Mr. Boddy, if you please. My school shall see that none
insult me with impunity!’ He laid on Heriot like a wind on a bulrush.
Heriot bent his shoulders a trifle, not his head.

‘Hit away, sir,’ he said, during the storm of blows, and I, through
my tears, imagined him (or I do now) a young eagle forced to bear the
thunder, but with his face to it. Then we saw Boddy lay hands on
him, and in a twinkling down pitched the usher, and the boys
cheered--chirped, I should say, they exulted so, and merely sang out
like birds, without any wilfulness of delight or defiance. After the
fall of Boddy we had no sense of our hero suffering shame. Temple and I
clutched fingers tight as long as the blows went on. We hoped for
Boddy to make another attempt to touch Heriot; he held near the master,
looking ready to spring, like a sallow panther; we kept hoping he would,
in our horror of the murderous slashes of the cane; and not a syllable
did Heriot utter. Temple and I started up, unaware of what we were going
to do, or of anything until we had got a blow a-piece, and were in the
thick of it, and Boddy had us both by the collars, and was knocking our
heads together, as he dragged us back to our seats. But the boys told us
we stopped the execution. Mr. Rippenger addressed us before he left the
school-room. Saddlebank, Salter, and a good many others, plugged
their ears with their fists. That night Boddy and Catman paced in the
bedchambers, to prevent plotting and conspiracy, they said. I longed to
get my arms about Heriot, and thought of him, and dreamed of blood, and
woke in the morning wondering what made me cry, and my arms and back
very stiff. Heriot was gay as ever, but had fits of reserve; the word
passed round that we were not to talk of yesterday evening. We feared he
would refuse to play in the match.

‘Why not?’ said he, staring at us angrily. ‘Has Saddlebank broken his
arm, and can’t bowl?’

No, Saddlebank was in excellent trim, though shamefaced, as was Salter,
and most of the big boys were. They begged Heriot to let them shake his
hand.

‘Wait till we win our match,’ said Heriot.

Julia did not appear at morning prayers.

‘Ah,’ said Temple, ‘it’d make her sick to hear old Massacre praying.’ It
had nearly made him sick, he added, and I immediately felt that it had
nearly made me sick.

We supposed we should not see Julia at the match. She came, however, and
talked to everybody. I could not contain myself, I wanted so to tell her
what had befallen Heriot overnight, while he was batting, and the whole
ground cheering his hits. I on one side of her whispered:

‘I say, Julia, my dear, I say, do you know...’

And Temple on the other: ‘Miss Julia, I wish you’d let me tell you--’

We longed to arouse her pity for Heriot at the moment she was admiring
him, but she checked us, and as she was surrounded by ladies and
gentlemen of the town, and particular friends of hers, we could not
speak out. Heriot brought his bat to the booth for eighty-nine runs. His
sleeve happened to be unbuttoned, and there, on his arm, was a mark of
the cane.

‘Look!’ I said to Julia. But she looked at me.

‘Richie, are you ill?’

She assured me I was very pale, and I felt her trembling excessively,
and her parasol was covering us.

‘Here, Roy, Temple,’ we heard Heriot call; ‘here, come here and bowl to
me.’

I went and bowled till I thought my head was flying after the ball and
getting knocks, it swam and throbbed so horribly.

Temple related that I fell, and was carried all the way from the
cricket-field home by Heriot, who would not give me up to the usher. I
was in Julia’s charge three days. Every time I spoke of her father and
Heriot, she cried, ‘Oh, hush!’ and had tears on her eyelids. When I was
quite strong again, I made her hear me out. She held me and rocked over
me like a green tree in the wind and rain.

‘Was any name mentioned?’ she asked, with her mouth working, and to my
‘No,’ said ‘No, she knew there was none,’ and seemed to drink and choke,
and was one minute calm, all but a trembling hanging underlip, next
smiling on me, and next having her face carved in grimaces by the
jerking little tugs of her mouth, which I disliked to see, for she would
say nothing of what she thought of Heriot, and I thought to myself,
though I forbore to speak unkindly, ‘It’s no use your making yourself
look ugly, Julia.’ If she had talked of Heriot, I should have thought
that crying persons’ kisses were agreeable.

On my return into the school, I found it in a convulsion of excitement,
owing to Heriot’s sending Boddy a challenge to fight a duel with
pistols. Mr. Rippenger preached a sermon to the boys concerning the
unChristian spirit and hideous moral perversity of one who would even
consent to fight a duel. How much more reprehensible, then, was one that
could bring himself to defy a fellow-creature to mortal combat! We were
not of his opinion; and as these questions are carried by majorities, we
decided that Boddy was a coward, and approved the idea that Heriot
would have to shoot or scourge him when the holidays came. Mr. Rippenger
concluded his observations by remarking that the sharpest punishment he
could inflict upon Heriot was to leave him to his own conscience; which
he did for three days, and then asked him if he was in a fit state of
mind to beg Mr. Boddy’s pardon publicly.

‘I’m quite prepared to tell him what I think of him publicly, sir,’ said
Heriot.

A murmur of exultation passed through the school. Mr. Rippenger seized
little Temple, and flogged him. Far from dreading the rod, now that
Heriot and Temple had tasted it, I thought of punishment as a mad
pleasure, not a bit more awful than the burning furze-bush plunged into
by our fellows in a follow-my-leader scamper on the common; so I caught
Temple’s hand as he went by me, and said, eagerly, ‘Shall I sing out
hurrah?’

‘Bother it!’ was Temple’s answer, for he had taken a stinging dozen, and
had a tender skin.

Mr. Rippenger called me up to him, to inform me, that whoever I was,
and whatever I was, and I might be a little impostor foisted on his
benevolence, yet he would bring me to a knowledge of myself: he gave me
warning of it; and if my father objected to his method, my father must
write word to that effect, and attend punctually to business duties, for
Surrey House was not an almshouse, either for the sons of gentlemen of
high connection, or for the sons of vagabonds. Mr. Rippenger added a
spurning shove on my shoulder to his recommendation to me to resume my
seat. I did not understand him at all. I was, in fact, indebted to a boy
named Drew, a known sneak, for the explanation, in itself difficult to
comprehend. It was, that Mr. Rippenger was losing patience because
he had received no money on account of my boarding and schooling.
The intelligence filled my head like the buzz of a fly, occupying my
meditations without leading them anywhere. I spoke on the subject to
Heriot.

‘Oh, the sordid old brute!’ said he of Mr. Rippenger. ‘How can he know
the habits and feelings of gentlemen? Your father’s travelling, and
can’t write, of course. My father’s in India, and I get a letter from
him about once a year. We know one another, and I know he’s one of the
best officers in the British army. It’s just the way with schoolmasters
and tradesmen: they don’t care whether a man is doing his duty to his
country; he must attend to them, settle accounts with them--hang them!
I’ll send you money, dear little lad, after I’ve left.’

He dispersed my brooding fit. I was sure my father was a fountain of
gold, and only happened to be travelling. Besides, Heriot’s love for
Julia, whom none of us saw now, was an incessant distraction. She did
not appear at prayers. She sat up in the gallery at church, hardly to
be spied. A letter that Heriot flung over the gardenwall for her was
returned to him, open, enclosed by post.

‘A letter for Walter Heriot,’ exclaimed Mr. Boddy, lifting it high for
Heriot to walk and fetch it; and his small eyes blinked when Heriot said
aloud on his way, cheerfully,

‘A letter from the colonel in India!’

Boddy waited a minute, and then said, ‘Is your father in good health?’

Heriot’s face was scarlet. At first he stuttered, ‘My father!--I hope
so! What have you in common with him, sir?’

‘You stated that the letter was from your father,’ said Boddy.

‘What if it is, sir?’

‘Oh, in that case, nothing whatever to me.’

They talked on, and the youngest of us could perceive Boddy was bursting
with devilish glee. Heriot got a letter posted to Julia. It was laid
on his desk, with her name scratched completely out, and his put in its
place. He grew pale and sad, but did his work, playing his games, and
only letting his friends speak to him of lessons and play. His counsel
to me was, that in spite of everything, I was always to stick to my
tasks and my cricket. His sadness he could not conceal. He looked like
an old lamp with a poor light in it. Not a boy in the school missed
seeing how Boddy’s flat head perpetually had a side-eye on him.

All this came to an end. John Salter’s father lived on the other side
of the downs, and invited three of us to spend a day at his house. The
selection included Heriot, Saddlebank, and me. Mr. Rippenger, not liking
to refuse Mr. Salter, consented to our going, but pretended that I was
too young. Salter said his mother and sisters very much wished to make
my acquaintance. We went in his father’s carriage. A jolly wind blew
clouds and dust and leaves: I could have fancied I was going to my own
father. The sensation of freedom had a magical effect on me, so that I
was the wildest talker of them all. Even in the middle of the family
I led the conversation; and I did not leave Salter’s house without
receiving an assurance from his elder sisters that they were in love
with me. We drove home--back to prison, we called it--full of good
things, talking of Salter’s father’s cellar of wine and of my majority
Burgundy, which I said, believing it was true, amounted to twelve
hundred dozen; and an appointment was made for us to meet at Dipwell
Farm, to assist in consuming it, in my honour and my father’s. That
matter settled, I felt myself rolling over and over at a great rate, and
clasping a juniper tree. The horses had trenched from the chalk road
on to the downs. I had been shot out. Heriot and Salter had jumped
out--Heriot to look after me; but Saddlebank and the coachman were
driving at a great rate over the dark slope. Salter felt some anxiety
concerning his father’s horses, so we left him to pursue them, and
walked on laughing, Heriot praising me for my pluck.

‘I say good-bye to you to-night, Richie,’ said he. ‘We’re certain to
meet again. I shall go to a military school. Mind you enter a cavalry
regiment when you’re man enough. Look in the Army List, you’ll find
me there. My aunt shall make a journey and call on you while you’re at
Rippenger’s, so you shan’t be quite lonely.’

To my grief, I discovered that Heriot had resolved he would not return
to school.

‘You’ll get thrashed,’ he said; ‘I can’t help it: I hope you’ve grown
tough by this time. I can’t stay here. I feel more like a dog than a man
in that house now. I’ll see you back safe. No crying, young cornet!’

We had lost the sound of the carriage. Heriot fell to musing. He
remarked that the accident took away from Mr. Salter the responsibility
of delivering him at Surrey House, but that he, Heriot, was bound,
for Mr. Salter’s sake, to conduct me to the doors; an unintelligible
refinement of reasoning, to my wits. We reached our town between two
and three in the morning. There was a ladder leaning against one of the
houses in repair near the school. ‘You are here, are you!’ said Heriot,
speaking to the ladder: ‘you ‘ll do me a service--the last I shall want
in the neighbourhood.’ He managed to poise the ladder on his shoulder,
and moved forward.

‘Are we going in through the window?’ I asked, seeing him fix the ladder
against the school-house wall.

He said, ‘Hush; keep a look-out.’

I saw him mount high. When he tapped at the window I remembered it was
Julia’s; I heard her cry out inside. The window rose slowly. Heriot
spoke:

‘I have come to say good-bye to you, Julia, dear girl: don’t be afraid
of me.’ She answered inaudibly to my ears. He begged her to come to him
at once, only once, and hear him and take his hand. She was timid; he
had her fingers first, then her whole arm, and she leaned over him.
‘Julia, my sweet, dear girl,’ he said; and she:

‘Heriot, Walter, don’t go--don’t go; you do not care for me if you go.
Oh, don’t go.’

‘We’ve come to it,’ said Heriot.

She asked why he was not in bed, and moaned on:

‘Don’t go.’ I was speechless with wonder at the night and the scene.
They whispered; I saw their faces close together, and Heriot’s arms
round her neck. ‘Oh, Heriot, my darling, my Walter,’ she said, crying, I
knew by the sound of her voice.

‘Tell me you love me,’ said Heriot.

‘I do, I do, only don’t go,’ she answered.

‘Will you love me faithfully?’

‘I will; I do.’

‘Say, “I love you, Walter.”’

‘I love you, Walter.’

‘For ever.’

‘For ever. Oh! what a morning for me. Do you smell my honeysuckle? Oh,
don’t go away from me, Walter. Do you love me so?’

‘I’d go through a regiment of sabres to get at you.’

‘But smell the night air; how sweet! oh, how sweet! No, not kiss me, if
you are going to leave me; not kiss me, if you can be so cruel!’

‘Do you dream of me in your bed?’

‘Yes, every night.’

‘God bless the bed!’

‘Every night I dream of you. Oh! brave Heriot; dear, dear Walter, you
did not betray me; my father struck you, and you let him for my sake.
Every night I pray heaven to make you forgive him: I thought you would
hate me. I cried till I was glad you could not see me. Look at those two
little stars; no, they hurt me, I can’t look at them ever again. But no,
you are not going; you want to frighten me. Do smell the flowers. Don’t
make them poison to me. Oh, what a morning for me when you’re lost! And
me, to look out on the night alone! No, no more kisses! Oh, yes, I will
kiss you, dear.’

Heriot said, ‘Your mother was Irish, Julia.’

‘Yes. She would have loved you.’

‘I ‘ve Irish blood too. Give me her portrait. It ‘s the image of you.’

‘To take away? Walter! not to take it away?’

‘You darling! to keep me sure of you.’

‘Part with my mother’s portrait?’

‘Why, yes, if you love me one bit.’

‘But you are younger than me, Heriot.’

‘Then good-night, good-bye, Julia.’

‘Walter, I will fetch it.’

Heriot now told her I was below, and she looked down on me and called my
name softly, sending kisses from her fingers while he gave the cause for
our late return.

‘Some one must be sitting up for you--are we safe?’ she said.

Heriot laughed, and pressed for the portrait.

‘It is all I have. Why should you not have it? I want to be remembered.’

She sobbed as she said this and disappeared. Heriot still talked into
her room. I thought I heard a noise of the garden-door opening. A man
came out rushing at the ladder. I called in terror: ‘Mr. Boddy, stop,
sir.’ He pushed me savagely aside, pitching his whole force against the
ladder. Heriot pulled down Julia’s window; he fell with a heavy thump on
the ground, and I heard a shriek above. He tried to spring to his feet,
but dropped, supported himself on one of his hands, and cried:

‘All right; no harm done; how do you do, Mr. Boddy? I thought I’d try
one of the attics, as we were late, not to disturb the house. I ‘m not
hurt, I tell you,’ he cried as loud as he could.

The usher’s words were in a confusion of rage and inquiries. He
commanded Heriot to stand on his legs, abused him, asked him what he
meant by it, accused him of depravity, of crime, of disgraceful conduct,
and attempted to pluck him from the spot.

‘Hands off me,’ said Heriot; ‘I can help myself. The youngster ‘ll help
me, and we’ll go round to the front door. I hope, sir, you will behave
like a gentleman; make no row here, Mr. Boddy, if you’ve any respect for
people inside. We were upset by Mr. Salter’s carriage; it’s damaged my
leg, I believe. Have the goodness, sir, to go in by your road, and we’ll
go round and knock at the front door in the proper way. We shall have to
disturb the house after all.’

Heriot insisted. I was astonished to see Boddy obey him and leave us,
after my dear Heriot had hopped with his hand on my shoulder to the
corner of the house fronting the road. While we were standing alone a
light cart drove by. Heriot hailed it, and hopped up to the driver.

‘Take me to London, there’s a good fellow,’ he said; ‘I’m a gentleman;
you needn’t look fixed. I’ll pay you well and thank you. But quick. Haul
me up, up; here’s my hand. By jingo! this is pain.’

The man said, ‘Scamped it out of school, sir?’

Heriot replied: ‘Mum. Rely on me when I tell you I’m a gentleman.’

‘Well, if I pick up a gentleman, I can’t be doing a bad business,’ said
the man, hauling him in tenderly.

Heriot sung to me in his sweet manner, ‘Good-bye, little Richie. Knock
when five minutes are over. God bless you, dear little lad! Leg ‘ll get
well by morning, never fear for me; and we’ll meet somehow; we’ll drink
the Burgundy. No crying. Kiss your hand to me.’

I kissed my hand to him. I had no tears to shed; my chest kept heaving
enormously. My friend was gone. I stood in the road straining to hear
the last of the wheels after they had long been silent.



CHAPTER VI. A TALE OF A GOOSE

From that hour till the day Heriot’s aunt came to see me, I lived
systematically out of myself in extreme flights of imagination, locking
my doors up, as it were, all the faster for the extremest strokes of Mr.
Rippenger’s rod. He remarked justly that I grew an impenetrably sullen
boy, a constitutional rebel, a callous lump: and assured me that if my
father would not pay for me, I at least should not escape my debts. The
title of little impostor, transmitted from the master’s mouth to the
school in designation of one who had come to him as a young prince,
and for whom he had not received one penny’s indemnification, naturally
caused me to have fights with several of the boys. Whereupon I was
reported: I was prayed at to move my spirit, and flogged to exercise my
flesh. The prayers I soon learnt to laugh to scorn. The floggings, after
they were over, crowned me with delicious sensations of martyrdom. Even
while the sting lasted I could say, it’s for Heriot and Julia! and it
gave me a wonderful penetration into--the mournful ecstasy of love.
Julia was sent away to a relative by the sea-side, because, one of the
housemaids told me, she could not bear to hear of my being beaten. Mr.
Rippenger summoned me to his private room to bid me inform him whether I
had other relatives besides my father, such as grandfather, grandmother,
uncles, or aunts, or a mother. I dare say Julia would have led me to
break my word to my father by speaking of old Riversley, a place I
half longed for since my father had grown so distant and dim to me; but
confession to Mr. Rippenger seemed, as he said of Heriot’s behaviour
to him, a gross breach of trust to my father; so I refused steadily to
answer, and suffered the consequences now on my dear father’s
behalf. Heriot’s aunt brought me a cake, and in a letter from him an
extraordinary sum of money for a boy of my age. He wrote that he knew I
should want it to pay my debts for treats to the boys and keep them in
good humour. He believed also that his people meant to have me for
the Christmas holidays. The sum he sent me was five pounds, carefully
enclosed. I felt myself a prince again. The money was like a golden
gate through which freedom twinkled a finger. Forthwith I paid my debts,
amounting to two pounds twelve shillings, and instructed a couple of
day-boarders, commercial fellows, whose heavy and mysterious charges for
commissions ran up a bill in no time, to prepare to bring us materials
for a feast on Saturday. Temple abominated the trading propensities
of these boys. ‘They never get licked and they’ve always got money, at
least I know they always get mine,’ said he; ‘but you and I and Heriot
despise them.’ Our position toward them was that of an encumbered
aristocracy, and really they paid us great respect. The fact was that,
when they had trusted us, they were compelled to continue obsequious,
for Heriot had instilled the sentiment in the school, that gentlemen
never failed to wipe out debts in the long run, so it was their interest
to make us feel they knew us to be gentlemen, who were at some time or
other sure to pay, and thus also they operated on our consciences. From
which it followed that one title of superiority among us, ranking next
in the order of nobility to the dignity conferred by Mr. Rippenger’s
rod, was the being down in their books. Temple and I walked in the halo
of unlimited credit like more than mortal twins. I gave an order for
four bottles of champagne.

On the Friday evening Catman walked out with us. His studious habits
endeared him to us immensely, owing to his having his head in his book
on all occasions, and a walk under his superintendence was first cousin
to liberty. Some boys roamed ahead, some lagged behind, while Catman
turned over his pages, sounding the return only when it grew dark. The
rumour of the champagne had already intoxicated the boys. There was a
companion and most auspicious rumour that Boddy was going to be absent
on Saturday. If so, we said, we may drink our champagne under Catman’s
nose and he be none the wiser. Saddlebank undertook to manage our feast
for us. Coming home over the downs, just upon twilight, Temple and I saw
Saddlebank carrying a long withy upright. We asked him what it was for.
He shouted back: ‘It’s for fortune. You keep the rear guard.’ Then we
saw him following a man and a flock of geese, and imitating the action
of the man with his green wand. As we were ready to laugh at anything
Saddlebank did, we laughed at this. The man walked like one half asleep,
and appeared to wake up now and then to find that he was right in the
middle of his geese, and then he waited, and Saddlebank waited behind
him. Presently the geese passed a lane leading off the downs. We saw
Saddlebank duck his wand in a coaxing way, like an angler dropping his
fly for fish; he made all sorts of curious easy flourishes against the
sky and branched up the lane. We struck after him, little suspecting
that he had a goose in front, but he had; he had cut one of the
loiterers off from the flock; and to see him handle his wand on either
side his goose, encouraging it to go forward, and remonstrating, and
addressing it in bits of Latin, and the creature pattering stiff and
astonished, sent us in a dance of laughter.

‘What have you done, old Saddle?’ said Temple, though it was perfectly
clear what Saddlebank had done.

‘I’ve carved off a slice of Michaelmas,’ said Saddlebank, and he hewed
the air to flick delicately at his goose’s head.

‘What do you mean--a slice?’ said we.

We wanted to be certain the goose was captured booty. Saddlebank would
talk nothing but his fun. Temple fetched a roaring sigh:

‘Oh! how good this goose ‘d be with our champagne.’

The idea seized and enraptured me. ‘Saddlebank, I ‘ll buy him off you,’
I said.

‘Chink won’t flavour him,’ said Saddlebank, still at his business:
‘here, you two, cut back by the down and try all your might to get a
dozen apples before Catman counts heads at the door, and you hold your
tongues.’

We shot past the man with the geese--I pitied him--clipped a corner of
the down, and by dint of hard running reached the main street, mad for
apples, before Catman appeared there. Apples, champagne, and cakes were
now provided; all that was left to think of was the goose. We glorified
Saddlebank’s cleverness to the boys.

‘By jingo! what a treat you’ll have,’ Temple said among them, bursting
with our secret.

Saddlebank pleaded that he had missed his way on presenting himself
ten minutes after time. To me and Temple he breathed of goose, but he
shunned us; he had no fun in him till Saturday afternoon, when Catman
called out to hear if we were for cricket or a walk.

‘A walk on the downs,’ said Saddlebank.

Temple and I echoed him, and Saddlebank motioned his hand as though
he were wheedling his goose along. Saddlebank spoke a word to my
commissioners. I was to leave the arrangements for the feast to him, he
said. John Salter was at home unwell, so Saddlebank was chief. No sooner
did we stand on the downs than he gathered us all in a circle, and
taking off his cap threw in it some slips of paper. We had to draw
lots who should keep by Catman out of twenty-seven; fifteen blanks were
marked. Temple dashed his hand into the cap first ‘Like my luck,’ he
remarked, and pocketed both fists as he began strutting away to hide
his desperation at drawing a blank. I bought a substitute for him at the
price of half-a-crown,--Drew, a fellow we were glad to get rid of; he
wanted five shillings. The feast was worth fifty, but to haggle about
prices showed the sneak. He begged us to put by a taste for him; he was
groaned out of hearing. The fifteen looked so wretched when they saw
themselves divided from us that I gave them a shilling a-piece to
console them. They took their instructions from Saddlebank as to how
they were to surround Catman, and make him fancy us to be all in his
neighbourhood; and then we shook hands, they requesting us feebly to
drink their healths, and we saying, ay, that we would.

Temple was in distress of spirits because of his having been
ignominiously bought off. Saddlebank, however, put on such a pace that
no one had leisure for melancholy. ‘I’ll get you fellows up to boiling
point,’ said he. There was a tremendously hot sun overhead. On a
sudden he halted, exclaiming: ‘Cooks and gridirons! what about sage and
onions?’ Only Temple and I jumped at the meaning of this. We drew lots
for a messenger, and it was miserable to behold an unfortunate fellow
touch Saddlebank’s hand containing the notched bit of stick, and find
himself condemned to go and buy sage and onions somewhere, without
knowing what it was for how could he guess we were going to cook a raw
goose! The lot fell to a boy named Barnshed, a big slow boy, half way
up every class he was in, but utterly stupid out of school; which made
Saddlebank say: ‘They’ll take it he’s the bird that wants stuffing.’
Barnshed was directed where to rejoin us. The others asked why he was
trotted after sage and onions. ‘Because he’s an awful goose,’ said
Saddlebank.

Temple and I thought the word was out and hurrahed, and back came
Barnshed. We had a task in persuading him to resume his expedition, as
well as Saddlebank to forgive us. Saddlebank’s anger was excessive. We
conciliated him by calling him captain, and pretending to swear an oath
of allegiance. He now led us through a wood on to some fields down to
a shady dell, where we were to hold the feast in privacy. He did not
descend it himself. Vexatious as it was to see a tramp’s tent there, we
nevertheless acknowledged the respectful greeting of the women and the
man with a few questions about tentpegs, pots, and tin mugs. Saddlebank
remained aloft, keeping a look-out for the day-school fellows, Chaunter,
Davis, and Bystop, my commissioners. They did not keep us waiting
long. They had driven to the spot in a cart, according to Saddlebank’s
directions. Our provisions were in three large hampers. We praised their
forethought loudly at the sight of an extra bottle of champagne, with
two bottles of ginger-wine, two of currant, two of raisin, four pint
bottles of ale, six of ginger-beer, a Dutch cheese, a heap of tarts,
three sally-lunns, and four shillingsworth of toffy. Temple and I joined
our apples to the mass: a sight at which some of the boys exulted aloud.
The tramp-women insisted on spreading things out for us: ten yards off
their children squatted staring: the man smoked and chaffed us.

At last Saddlebank came running over the hill-side, making as if he
meant to bowl down what looked a black body of a baby against the sky,
and shouting, ‘See, you fellows, here’s a find!’ He ran through us,
swinging his goose up to the hampers, saying that he had found the goose
under a furze-bush. While the words were coming out of his mouth, he saw
the tramps, and the male tramp’s eyes and his met.

The man had one eyebrow and his lips at one corner screwed in a queer
lift: he winked slowly. ‘Odd! ain’t it?’ he said.

Saddlebank shouldered round on us, and cried, ‘Confound you fellows!
here’s a beastly place you’ve pitched upon.’ His face was the colour of
scarlet in patches.

‘Now, I call it a beautiful place,’ said the man, ‘and if you finds
gooses hereabouts growing ready for the fire, all but plucking, why,
it’s a bountiful place, I call it.’

The women tried to keep him silent. But for them we should have moved
our encampment. ‘Why, of course, young gentlemen, if you want to eat the
goose, we’ll pluck it for you and cook it for you, all nice,’ they said.
‘How can young gentlemen do that for theirselves?’

It was clear to us we must have a fire for the goose. Certain
observations current among us about the necessity to remove the goose’s
inside, and not to lose the giblets, which even the boy who named them
confessed his inability to recognize, inclined the majority to accept
the woman’s proposal. Saddlebank said it was on our heads, then.

To revive his good humour, Temple uncorked a bottle of champagne. The
tramp-woman lent us a tin mug, and round it went. One boy said, ‘That’s
a commencement’; another said, ‘Hang old Rippenger.’ Temple snapped
his fingers, and Bystop, a farmer’s son, said, ‘Well, now I’ve drunk
champagne; I meant to before I died!’ Most of the boys seemed puzzled
by it. As for me, my heart sprang up in me like a colt turned out of
stables to graze. I determined that the humblest of my retainers should
feed from my table, and drink to my father’s and Heriot’s honour, and
I poured out champagne for the women, who just sipped, and the man, who
vowed he preferred beer. A spoonful of the mashed tarts I sent to each
of the children. Only one, the eldest, a girl about a year older than
me, or younger, with black eyebrows and rough black hair, refused to eat
or drink.

‘Let her bide, young gentlemen,’ said a woman; ‘she’s a regular
obstinate, once she sets in for it.’

‘Ah!’ said the man, ‘I’ve seen pigs druv, and I’ve seen iron bent
double. She’s harder ‘n both, once she takes ‘t into her head.’

‘By jingo, she’s pig-iron!’ cried Temple, and sighed, ‘Oh, dear old
Heriot!’

I flung myself beside him to talk of our lost friend.

A great commotion stirred the boys. They shrieked at beholding their
goose vanish in a pot for stewing. They wanted roast-goose, they
exclaimed, not boiled; who cared for boiled goose! But the woman asked
them how it was possible to roast a goose on the top of wood-flames,
where there was nothing to hang it by, and nothing would come of it
except smoked bones!

The boys groaned in consternation, and Saddlebank sowed discontent by
grumbling, ‘Now you see what your jolly new acquaintances have done for
you.’

So we played at catch with the Dutch cheese, and afterwards bowled it
for long-stopping, when, to the disgust of Saddlebank and others, down
ran the black-haired girl and caught the ball clean at wicket-distance.
As soon as she had done it she was ashamed, and slunk away.

The boys called out, ‘Now, then, pig-iron!’

One fellow enraged me by throwing an apple that hit her in the back. We
exchanged half-a-dozen blows, whereupon he consented to apologize, and
roared, ‘Hulloa, pig-iron, sorry if I hurt you.’

Temple urged me to insist on the rascal’s going on his knees for
flinging at a girl.

‘Why,’ said Chaunter, ‘you were the first to call her pig-iron.’

Temple declared he was a blackguard if he said that. I made the girl
take a piece of toffy.

‘Aha!’ Saddlebank grumbled, ‘this comes of the precious company you
would keep in spite of my caution.’

The man told us to go it, for he liked to observe young gentlemen
enjoying themselves. Temple tossed him a pint bottle of beer, with an
injunction to him to shut his trap.

‘Now, you talk my mother tongue,’ said the man; ‘you’re what goes by the
name of a learned gentleman. Thank ye, sir. You’ll be a counsellor some
day.’

‘I won’t get off thieves, I can tell you,’ said Temple. He was the son
of a barrister.

‘Nor you won’t help cook their gooses for them, may be,’ said the man.
‘Well, kindness is kindness, all over the world.’

The women stormed at him to command him not to anger the young
gentlemen, for Saddlebank was swearing awfully in an undertone. He
answered them that he was the mildest lamb afloat.

Despairing of the goose, we resolved to finish the cold repast awaiting
us. The Dutch cheese had been bowled into bits. With a portion of the
mashed tarts on it, and champagne, it tasted excellently; toffy to
follow. Those boys who chose ginger-wine had it, and drank, despised.
The ginger-beer and ale, apples and sallylunns, were reserved for
supper. My mind became like a driving sky, with glimpses of my father
and Heriot bursting through.

‘If I’m not a prince, I’m a nobleman,’ I said to Temple.

He replied, ‘Army or Navy. I don’t much care which. We’re sure of
a foreign war some time. Then you’ll see fellows rise: lieutenant,
captain, colonel, General--quick as barrels popping at a bird. I should
like to be Governor of Gibraltar.’

‘I’ll come and see you, Temple,’ said I.

‘Done! old Richie,’ he said, grasping my hand warmly.

‘The truth is, Temple,’ I confided to him, ‘I’ve an uncle-I mean a
grandfather-of enormous property; he owns half Hampshire, I believe, and
hates my father like poison. I won’t stand it. You’ve seen my father,
haven’t you? Gentlemen never forget their servants, Temple. Let’s drink
lots more champagne. I wish you and I were knights riding across that
country there, as they used to, and you saying, “I wonder whether your
father’s at home in the castle expecting our arrival.”’

‘The Baron!’ said Temple. ‘He’s like a Baron, too. His health. Your
health, sir! It’s just the wine to drink it in, Richie. He’s one of the
men I look up to. It ‘s odd he never comes to see you, because he’s fond
of you; the right sort of father! Big men can’t be always looking after
little boys. Not that we’re so young, though, now. Lots of fellows of
our age have done things fellows write about. I feel--’ Temple sat up
swelling his chest to deliver an important sentiment; ‘I feel uncommonly
thirsty.’

So did I. We attributed it to the air of the place, Temple going so far
as to say that it came off the chalk, which somehow stuck in the throat.

‘Saddleback, don’t look glum,’ said Temple. ‘Lord, Richie, you should
hear my father plead in Court with his wig on. They used to say at home
I was a clever boy when I was a baby. Saddleback, you’ve looked glum all
the afternoon.’

‘Treat your superiors respectfully,’ Saddlebank retorted.

The tramp was irritating him. That tramp had never left off smoking and
leaning on his arm since we first saw him. Two boys named Hackman and
Montague, not bad fellows, grew desirous of a whiff from his pipe. They
had it, and lay down silent, back to back. Bystop was led away in a
wretched plight. Two others, Paynter and Ashworth, attacked the apples,
rendered desperate by thirst. Saddlebank repelled them furiously. He
harangued those who might care to listen.

‘You fellows, by George! you shall eat the goose, I tell you. You’ve
spoilt everything, and I tell you, whether you like it or not, you shall
have apples with it, and sage and onions too. I don’t ask for thanks.
And I propose to post outposts in the wood to keep watch.’

He wanted us to draw lots again. His fun had entirely departed from him;
all he thought of was seeing the goose out of the pot. I had a feeling
next to hatred for one who could talk of goose. Temple must have shared
it.

‘We ‘ve no real captain now dear old Heriot ‘s gone,’ he said. ‘The
school’s topsy-turvy: we’re like a lot of things rattled in a box. Oh,
dear! how I do like a good commander. On he goes, you after him, never
mind what happens.’

A pair of inseparable friends, Happitt and Larkins, nicknamed
Happy-go-Lucky, were rolling arm-in-arm, declaring they were perfectly
sober, and, for a proof of it, trying to direct their feet upon a lump
of chalk, and marching, and missing it. Up came Chaunter to them: ‘Fat
goose?’ he said-no more. Both the boys rushed straight as far as they
could go; both sung out, ‘I’m done!’ and they were.

Temple and I contemplated these proceedings as matters belonging to the
ordinary phenomena of feasting. We agreed that gentlemen were always the
last to drop, and were assured, therefore, of our living out the field;
but I dreaded the moment of the goose’s appearance, and I think he did
also. Saddlebank’s pertinacity in withholding the cool ginger-beer and
the apples offended us deeply; we should have conspired against him had
we reposed confidence in our legs and our tongues.

Twilight was around us. The tramp-children lay in little bundles in
one tent; another was being built by the women and the girl. Overhead I
counted numbers of stars, all small; and lights in the valley-lights of
palaces to my imagination. Stars and tramps seemed to me to go together.
Houses imprisoned us, I thought a lost father was never to be discovered
by remaining in them. Plunged among dark green leaves, smelling
wood-smoke, at night; at morning waking up, and the world alight, and
you standing high, and marking the hills where you will see the next
morning and the next, morning after morning, and one morning the dearest
person in the world surprising you just before you wake: I thought this
a heavenly pleasure. But, observing the narrowness of the tents,
it struck me there would be snoring companions. I felt so intensely
sensitive, that the very idea of a snore gave me tremours and qualms: it
was associated with the sense of fat. Saddlebank had the lid of the pot
in his hand; we smelt the goose, and he cried, ‘Now for supper; now for
it! Halloa, you fellows!’

‘Bother it, Saddlebank, you’ll make Catman hear you,’ said Temple,
wiping his forehead.

I perspired coldly.

‘Catman! He’s been at it for the last hour and a half,’ Saddlebank
replied.

One boy ran up: he was ready, and the only one who was. Presently
Chaunter rushed by.

‘Barnshed ‘s in custody; I’m away home,’ he said, passing.

We stared at the black opening of the dell.

‘Oh, it’s Catman; we don’t mind him,’ Saddlebank reassured us; but we
heard ominous voices, and perceived people standing over a prostrate
figure. Then we heard a voice too well known to us. It said, ‘The
explanation of a pupil in your charge, Mr. Catman, being sent barefaced
into the town--a scholar of mine-for sage and onions...’

‘Old Rippenger!’ breathed Temple.

We sat paralyzed. Now we understood the folly of despatching a donkey
like Barnshed for sage and onions.

‘Oh, what asses we have been!’ Temple continued. ‘Come along-we run for
it! Come along, Richie! They ‘re picking up the fellows like windfalls.’

I told him I would not run for it; in fact, I distrusted my legs; and he
was staggering, answering Saddlebank’s reproaches for having come among
tramps.

‘Temple, I see you, sir!’ called Mr. Rippenger. Poor Temple had advanced
into the firelight.

With the instinct to defeat the master, I crawled in the line of the
shadows to the farther side of a tent, where I felt a hand clutch
mine. ‘Hide me,’ said I; and the curtain of the tent was raised. After
squeezing through boxes and straw, I lay flat, covered by a mat smelling
of abominable cheese, and felt a head outside it on my chest. Several
times Mr. Rippenger pronounced my name in the way habitual to him in
anger: ‘Rye!’

Temple’s answer was inaudible to me. Saddlebank spoke, and other boys,
and the man and the woman. Then a light was thrust in the tent, and the
man said, ‘Me deceive you, sir! See for yourself, to satisfy yourself.
Here’s our little uns laid warm, and a girl there, head on the mat,
going down to join her tribe at Lipcombe, and one of our women sleeps
here, and all told. But for you to suspect me of combining--Thank ye,
sir. You’ve got my word as a man.’

The light went away. My chest was relieved of the weight on it. I sat
up, and the creature who had been kind to me laid mat and straw on the
ground, and drew my head on her shoulder, where I slept fast.



CHAPTER VII. A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD

I woke very early, though I had taken kindly to my pillow, as I found by
my having an arm round my companion’s neck, and her fingers intertwisted
with mine. For awhile I lay looking at her eyes, which had every
imaginable light and signification in them; they advised me to lie
quiet, they laughed at my wonder, they said, ‘Dear little fellow!’ they
flashed as from under a cloud, darkened, flashed out of it, seemed to
dip in water and shine, and were sometimes like a view into a forest,
sometimes intensely sunny, never quite still. I trusted her, and could
have slept again, but the sight of the tent stupefied me; I fancied the
sky had fallen, and gasped for air; my head was extremely dizzy too; not
one idea in it was kept from wheeling. This confusion of my head flew
to my legs when, imitating her, I rose to go forth. In a fit of horror I
thought, ‘I ‘ve forgotten how to walk!’

Summoning my manful resolution, I made the attempt to step across the
children swaddled in matting and straw and old gowns or petticoats. The
necessity for doing it with a rush seized me after the first step. I
pitched over one little bundle, right on to the figure of a sleeping
woman. All she did was to turn round, murmuring, ‘Naughty Jackie.’ My
companion pulled me along gravely, and once in the air, with a good
breath of it in my chest, I felt tall and strong, and knew what had
occurred. The tent where I had slept struck me as more curious than my
own circumstances. I lifted my face to the sky; it was just sunrise,
beautiful; bits of long and curling cloud brushed any way close on the
blue, and rosy and white, deliciously cool; the grass was all grey,
our dell in shadow, and the tops of the trees burning, a few birds
twittering.

I sucked a blade of grass.

‘I wish it was all water here,’ I said.

‘Come and have a drink and a bathe,’ said my companion.

We went down the dell and over a juniper slope, reminding me of my day
at John Salter’s house and the last of dear Heriot. Rather to my shame,
my companion beat me at running; she was very swift, and my legs were
stiff.

‘Can you swim?’ she asked me.

‘I can row, and swim, and fence, and ride, and fire a pistol,’ I said.

‘Oh, dear,’ said she, after eyeing me enviously. I could see that I had
checked a recital of her accomplishments.

We arrived at a clear stream in a gentleman’s park, where grass rolled
smooth as sea-water on a fine day, and cows and horses were feeding.

‘I can catch that horse and mount him,’ she said.

I was astonished.

‘Straddle?’

She nodded down for ‘Yes.’

‘No saddle?’

She nodded level for ‘No.’

My respect for her returned. But she could not swim.

‘Only up to my knees,’ she confessed.

‘Have a look at me,’ said I; and I stripped and shot into the water,
happy as a fish, and thinking how much nicer it was than champagne. My
enjoyment made her so envious that she plucked off her stockings, and
came in as far as she dared. I called to her. ‘You’re like a cow,’ and
she showed her teeth, bidding me not say that.

‘A cow! a cow!’ I repeated, in my superior pleasure.

She spun out in a breath, ‘If you say that, I ‘ll run away with every
bit of your clothes, and you’ll come out and run about naked, you will.’

‘Now I float,’ was my answer, ‘now I dive’; and when I came up she
welcomed me with a big bright grin.

A smart run in the heat dried me. I dressed, finding half my money on
the grass. She asked me to give her one of those bits-a shilling. I
gave her two, upon which she asked me, invitingly, if ever I tossed. I
replied that I never tossed for money; but she had caught a shilling,
and I could not resist guessing ‘heads,’ and won; the same with her
second shilling. She handed them to me sullenly, sobbing, yet she would
not take them back.

‘By-and-by you give me another two,’ she said, growing lively again.
We agreed that it would be a good thing if we entered the village and
bought something. None of the shops were open. We walked through the
churchyard. I said, ‘Here’s where dead people are buried.’

‘I’ll dance if you talk about dead people,’ said she, and began whooping
at the pitch of her voice. On my wishing to know why she did it, her
reply was that it was to make the dead people hear. My feelings were
strange: the shops not open, and no living people to be seen. We climbed
trees, and sat on a branch talking of birds’ eggs till hunger drove
us to the village street, where, near the public-house, we met the
man-tramp, who whistled.

He was rather amusing. He remarked that he put no questions to me,
because he put no question to anybody, because answers excited him about
subjects that had no particular interest to him, and did not benefit
him to the extent of a pipe of ‘tobacco; and all through not being
inquisitive, yesterday afternoon he had obtained, as if it had been
chucked into his lap, a fine-flavoured fat goose honourably for his
supper, besides bottles of ale, bottles of ginger-pop, and a fair-earned
half-crown. That was through his not being inquisitive, and he was not
going to be inquisitive now, knowing me for a gentleman: my master had
tipped him half-a-crown.

Fortunately for him, and perhaps for my liberty, he employed a
verb marvellously enlightening to a schoolboy. I tipped him another
half-crown. He thanked me, observing that there were days when you lay
on your back and the sky rained apples; while there were other days when
you wore your fingers down to the first joint to catch a flea. Such was
Fortune!

In a friendly manner he advised me to go to school; if not there, then
to go home. My idea, which I had only partly conceived, was to have a
look at Riversley over a hedge, kiss my aunt Dorothy unaware, and
fly subsequently in search of my father. Breakfast, however, was my
immediate thought. He and the girl sat down to breakfast at the inn
as my guests. We ate muttonchops and eggs, and drank coffee. After it,
though I had no suspicions, I noticed that the man grew thoughtful. He
proposed to me, supposing I had no objection against slow travelling,
to join company for a couple of days, if I was for Hampshire, which I
stated was the county I meant to visit.

‘Well then, here now, come along, d ‘ye see, look,’ said he, ‘I mustn’t
be pounced on, and no missing young gentleman in my society, and me took
half-a-crown for his absence; that won’t do. You get on pretty well with
the gal, and that ‘s a screaming farce: none of us do. Lord! she looks
down on such scum as us. She’s gipsy blood, true sort; everything’s
sausages that gets into their pockets, no matter what it was when it
was out. Well then, now, here, you and the gal go t’ other side o’
Bed’lming, and you wait for us on the heath, and we ‘ll be there to
comfort ye ‘fore dark. Is it a fister?’

He held out his hand; I agreed; and he remarked that he now counted a
breakfast in the list of his gains from never asking questions.

I was glad enough to quit the village in a hurry, for the driver of
the geese, or a man dreadfully resembling him, passed me near the
public-house, and attacked my conscience on the cowardly side, which is,
I fear, the first to awaken, and always the liveliest half while we
are undisciplined. I would have paid him money, but the idea of a
conversation with him indicated the road back to school. My companion
related her history. She belonged to a Hampshire gipsy tribe, and had
been on a visit to a relative down in the East counties, who died on the
road, leaving her to be brought home by these tramps: she called them
mumpers, and made faces when she spoke of them. Gipsies, she said, were
a different sort: gipsies camped in gentlemen’s parks; gipsies, horses,
fiddles, and the wide world--that was what she liked. The wide world she
described as a heath, where you looked and never saw the end of it I let
her talk on. For me to talk of my affairs to a girl without bonnet and
boots would have been absurd. Otherwise, her society pleased me: she was
so like a boy, and unlike any boy I knew.

My mental occupation on the road was to calculate how many hill-tops I
should climb before I beheld Riversley. The Sunday bells sounded homely
from village to village as soon as I was convinced that I heard no bells
summoning boarders to Rippenger’s school. The shops in the villages
continued shut; however, I told the girl they should pay me for it next
day, and we had an interesting topic in discussing as to the various
things we would buy. She was for bright ribands and draper’s stuff, I
for pastry and letter-paper. The smell of people’s dinners united our
appetites. Going through a village I saw a man carrying a great baked
pie, smelling overpoweringly, so that to ask him his price for it was
a natural impulse with me. ‘What! sell my Sunday dinner?’ he said, and
appeared ready to drop the dish. Nothing stopped his staring until we
had finished a plateful a-piece and some beer in his cottage among his
family. He wanted to take me in alone. ‘She’s a common tramp,’ he said
of the girl.

‘That’s a lie,’ she answered.

Of course I would not leave her hungry outside, so in the end he
reluctantly invited us both, and introduced us to his wife.

‘Here’s a young gentleman asks a bit o’ dinner, and a young
I-d’n-know-what ‘s after the same; I leaves it to you, missus.’

His wife took it off his shoulders in good humour, saying it was lucky
she made the pie big enough for her family and strays. They would not
accept more than a shilling for our joint repast. The man said that was
the account to a farthing, if I was too proud to be a poor man’s guest,
and insisted on treating him like a public. Perhaps I would shake hands
at parting? I did cordially, and remembered him when people were not so
civil. They wanted to know whether we had made a runaway match of it.
The fun of passing a boys’-school and hearing the usher threaten to
punish one fellow for straying from ranks, entertained me immensely. I
laughed at them just as the stupid people we met laughed at me, which
was unpleasant for the time; but I knew there was not a single boy who
would not have changed places with me, only give him the chance, though
my companion was a gipsy girl, and she certainly did look odd company
for a gentleman’s son in a tea-garden and public-house parlour. At
nightfall, however, I was glad of her and she of me, and we walked hand
in hand. I narrated tales of Roman history. It was very well for her so
say, ‘I’ll mother you,’ as we lay down to sleep; I discovered that
she would never have hooted over churchyard graves in the night. She
confessed she believed the devil went about in the night. Our bed was a
cart under a shed, our bed-clothes fern-leaves and armfuls of straw. The
shafts of the cart were down, so we lay between upright and level, and
awakening in the early light I found our four legs hanging over the seat
in front. ‘How you have been kicking!’ said I. She accused me of the
same. Next minute she pointed over the side of the cart, and I saw the
tramp’s horse and his tents beneath a broad roadside oak-tree. Her face
was comical, just like a boy’s who thinks he has escaped and is caught.
‘Let’s run,’ she said. Preferring positive independence, I followed
her, and then she told me that she had overheard the tramp last night
swearing I was as good as a fistful of half-crowns lost to him if he
missed me. The image of Rippenger’s school overshadowed me at this
communication. With some melancholy I said: ‘You’ll join your friends,
won’t you?’

She snapped her fingers: ‘Mumpers!’ and walked on carelessly.

We were now on the great heaths. They brought the memory of my father
vividly; the smell of the air half inclined me to turn my steps toward
London, I grew so full of longing for him. Nevertheless I resolved
to have one gaze at Riversley, my aunt Dorothy, and Sewis, the old
grey-brown butler, and the lamb that had grown a sheep; wonderful
contrasts to my grand kings of England career. My first clear
recollection of Riversley was here, like an outline of a hill seen miles
away. I might have shed a tear or two out of love for my father, had not
the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I could not
but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me. Suppose
I joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had brothers,
horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the fiddle? Suppose
I learnt their language and went about with them and became king of
the gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not encourage this
ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of the gipsies or
a queen either. ‘We fool people,’ she said, and offended me, for our
school believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman, used to sing a
song of a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that my schoolfellows
were fools, every one of them. I accused her of telling lies. She
grinned angrily. ‘I don’t tell ‘em to friends,’ she said. We had
a quarrel. The truth was, I was enraged at the sweeping out of my
prospects of rising to distinction among the gipsies. After breakfast at
an inn, where a waiter laughed at us to our faces, and we fed scowling,
shy, and hungry, we had another quarrel. I informed her of my opinion
that gipsies could not tell fortunes.

‘They can, and you come to my mother and my aunt, and see if they can’t
tell your fortune,’ said she, in a fury.

‘Yes, and that’s how they fool people,’ said I. I enjoyed seeing the
flash of her teeth. But my daring of her to look me in the eyes and
swear on her oath she believed the fortunes true ones, sent her into a
fit of sullenness.

‘Go along, you nasty little fellow, your shadow isn’t half a yard,’ she
said, and I could smile at that; my shadow stretched half across the
road. We had a quarrelsome day wherever we went; rarely walking close
together till nightfall, when she edged up to my hand, with, ‘I say,
I’ll keep you warm to-night, I will.’ She hugged me almost too tight,
but it was warm and social, and helped to the triumph of a feeling I had
that nothing made me regret running away from Rippenger’s school.

An adventure befell us in the night. A farmer’s wife, whom we asked for
a drink of water after dark, lent us an old blanket to cover us in a
dry ditch on receiving our promise not to rob the orchard. An old beggar
came limping by us, and wanted to share our covering. My companion sank
right under the blanket to peer at him through one of its holes. He
stood enormous above me in the moonlight, like an apparition touching
earth and sky.

‘Cold, cold,’ he whined: ‘there’s ne’er a worse off but there’s a better
off. Young un!’ His words dispersed the fancy that he was something
horrible, or else my father in disguise going to throw off his rags, and
shine, and say he had found me. ‘Are ye one, or are ye two?’ he asked.

I replied that we were two.

‘Then I’ll come and lie in the middle,’ said he.

‘You can’t; there’s no room,’ I sang out.

‘Lord,’ said he, ‘there’s room for any reckoning o’ empty stomachs in a
ditch.’

‘No, I prefer to be alone: good-night,’ said I.

‘Why!’ he exclaimed, ‘where ha’ you been t’ learn language? Halloa!’

‘Please, leave me alone; it’s my intention to go to sleep,’ I said,
vexed at having to conciliate him; he had a big stick.

‘Oho!’ went the beggar. Then he recommenced:

‘Tell me you’ve stole nothing in your life! You’ve stole a gentleman’s
tongue, I knows the ring o’ that. How comes you out here? Who’s your
mate there down below? Now, see, I’m going to lift my stick.’

At these menacing words the girl jumped out of the blanket, and I called
to him that I would rouse the farmer.

‘Why... because I’m goin’ to knock down a apple or two on your head?’ he
inquired, in a tone of reproach. ‘It’s a young woman you’ve got there,
eh? Well, odd grows odder, like the man who turned three shillings into
five. Now, you gi’ me a lie under your blanket, I ‘ll knock down a apple
apiece. If ever you’ve tasted gin, you ‘ll say a apple at night’s a
cordial, though it don’t intoxicate.’

The girl whispered in my ear, ‘He’s lame as ducks.’ Her meaning seized
me at once; we both sprang out of the ditch and ran, dragging our
blanket behind us. He pursued, but we eluded him, and dropped on a quiet
sleeping-place among furzes. Next morning, when we took the blanket
to the farm-house, we heard that the old wretch had traduced our
characters, and got a breakfast through charging us with the robbery of
the apple-tree. I proved our innocence to the farmer’s wife by putting
down a shilling. The sight of it satisfied her. She combed my hair,
brought me a bowl of water and a towel, and then gave us a bowl of milk
and bread, and dismissed us, telling me I had a fair face and dare-devil
written on it: as for the girl, she said of her that she knew gipsies
at a glance, and what God Almighty made them for there was no guessing.
This set me thinking all through the day, ‘What can they have been made
for?’ I bought a red scarf for the girl, and other things she fixed her
eyes on, but I lost a great deal of my feeling of fellowship with her.
‘I dare say they were made for fun,’ I thought, when people laughed at
us now, and I laughed also.

I had a day of rollicking laughter, puzzling the girl, who could only
grin two or three seconds at a time, and then stared like a dog that
waits for his master to send him off again running, the corners of her
mouth twitching for me to laugh or speak, exactly as a dog might wag
his tail. I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of unaccountable
creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had escaped from
school.

We loitered half the morning round a cricketers’ booth in a field,
where there was moderately good cricketing. The people thought it of
first-rate quality. I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out
either eleven in an hour and a half. One of the men frightened me by
saying, ‘By Gearge! I’ll in with you into a gig, and off with you after
that ther’ faller.’ He pretended to mean it, and started up. I watched
him without flinching. He remarked that if I ‘had not cut my lucky from
school, and tossed my cap for a free life, he was ----’ whatever may be
expressed by a slap on the thigh. We played a single-wicket side game,
he giving me six runs, and crestfallen he was to find himself beaten;
but, as I let him know, one who had bowled to Heriot for hours and stood
against Saddlebank’s bowling, was a tough customer, never mind his age.

This man offered me his friendship. He made me sit and eat beside him at
the afternoon dinner of the elevens, and sent platefuls of food to the
girl, where she was allowed to squat; and said he, ‘You and I’ll tie a
knot, and be friends for life.’

I replied, ‘With pleasure.’

We nodded over a glass of ale. In answer to his questions, I stated that
I liked farms, I would come and see his farm, I would stay with him two
or three days, I would give him my address if I had one, I was on my way
to have a look at Riversley Grange.

‘Hey!’ says he, ‘Riversley Grange! Well, to be sure now! I’m a tenant of
Squire Beltham’s, and a right sort of landlord, too.’

‘Oh!’ says I, ‘he’s my grandfather, but I don’t care much about him.’

‘Lord!’ says he. ‘What! be you the little boy, why, Master Harry
Richmond that was carried off in the night, and the old squire shut up
doors for a fortnight, and made out you was gone in a hearse! Why, I
know all about you, you see. And back you are, hurrah! The squire ‘ll be
hearty, that he will. We’ve noticed a change in him ever since you left.
Gout’s been at his leg, off and on, a deal shrewder. But he rides to
hounds, and dines his tenants still, that he does; he’s one o’ th’ old
style. Everything you eat and drink’s off his estate, the day he dines
his tenants. No humbug ‘bout old Squire Beltham.

I asked him if Sewis was alive.

‘Why, old Sewis,’ says he, ‘you’re acquainted with old Sewis? Why, of
course you are. Yes, old Sewis ‘s alive, Master Harry. And you bet me at
single-wicket! That ‘ll be something to relate to ‘em all. By Gearge, if
I didn’t think I’d got a nettle in my fist when I saw you pitch into my
stumps. Dash it! thinks I. But th’ old squire ‘ll be proud of you, that
he will. My farm lies three miles away. You look at a crow flying due
South-east five minutes from Riversley, and he’s over Throckham farm,
and there I ‘ll drive ye to-night, and to-morrow, clean and tidy out
o’ my wife’s soap and water, straight to Riversley. Done, eh? My name’s
Eckerthy. No matter where you comes from, here you are, eh, Master
Harry? And I see you last time in a donkey-basket, and here you come in
breeches and defy me to singlewicket, and you bet me too!’

He laughed for jollity. An extraordinary number of emotions had
possession of me: the most intelligible one being a restless vexation at
myself, as the principal person concerned, for not experiencing anything
like the farmer’s happiness. I preferred a gipsy life to Riversley.
Gipsies were on the road, and that road led to my father. I endeavoured
to explain to Farmer Eckerthy that I was travelling in this direction
merely to have a short look at Riversley; but it was impossible; he
could not understand me. The more I tried, the more he pressed me
to finish my glass of ale, which had nothing to do with it. I drank,
nevertheless, and I suppose said many funny things in my anxiety that
the farmer should know what I meant; he laughed enough.

While he was fielding against the opposite eleven, the tramp came into
the booth, and we had a match of cunning.

‘Schoolmaster’s out after you, young gentleman,’ said he, advising me to
hurry along the road if I sought to baffle pursuit.

I pretended alarm, and then said, ‘Oh, you’ll stand by me,’ and treated
him to ale.

He assured me I left as many tracks behind me as if I went spilling
a box of lucifer-matches. He was always for my hastening on until I
ordered fresh ale for him. The girl and he grimaced at one another
in contempt. So we remained seeing the game out. By the time the game
ended, the tramp had drunk numbers of glasses of ale.

‘A fine-flavoured fat goose,’ he counted his gains since the
commencement of our acquaintance, ‘bottles of ale and ginger-pop, two
half-crowns, more ale, and more to follow, let’s hope. You only stick
to your friends, young gentleman, won’t you, sir? It’s a hard case for
a poor man like me if you don’t. We ain’t got such chances every morning
of our lives. Do you perceive, sir? I request you to inform me, do you
perceive, sir? I’m muddled a bit, sir, but a man must look after his
interests.’

I perceived he was so muddled as to be unable to conceal that his
interests were involved in my capture; but I was merry too. Farmer
Eckerthy dealt the tramp a scattering slap on the back when he returned
to the booth, elated at having beaten the enemy by a single run.

‘Master Harry Richmond go to Riversley to his grandfather in your
company, you scoundrel!’ he cried in a rage, after listening to him. ‘I
mean to drive him over. It ‘s a comfortable ten-mile, and no more. But I
say, Master Harry, what do you say to a peck o’ supper?’

He communicated to me confidentially that he did not like to seem to
slink away from the others, who had made up their minds to stop and sup;
so we would drive home by moonlight, singing songs. And so we did. I sat
beside the farmer, the girl scrambled into the hinder part of the
cart, and the tramp stood moaning, ‘Oh dear! oh dear! you goes away to
Riversley without your best friend.’

I tossed him a shilling. We sang beginnings and ends of songs. The
farmer looked at the moon, and said, ‘Lord! she stares at us!’ Then he
sang:

       ‘The moon is shining on Latworth lea,
        And where’ll she see such a jovial three
        As we, boys, we? And why is she pale?
        It’s because she drinks water instead of ale.’

‘Where ‘s the remainder? There’s the song--!

          “Oh! handsome Miss Gammon
          Has married Lord Mammon,
          And jilted her suitors,
          All Cupid’s sharpshooters,
          And gone in a carriage
          And six to her marriage,
   Singing hey! for I’ve landed my salmon, my salmon!”

Where’s the remainder? I heard it th’ only time I ever was in London
town, never rested till I’d learnt it, and now it’s clean gone. What’s
come to me?’

He sang to ‘Mary of Ellingmere’ and another maid of some place, and a
loud song of Britons.

It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and
silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep. The girl had
roused me, and we crept down from the cart. Horse and farmer were quite
motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway. Looking across fields
and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour,
and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said
to myself, ‘No, no, that’s not Riversley; I’m sure it isn’t’; though the
certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me. I ran down the fields to
the park and the bright little river, and gazed. When I could say, ‘Yes,
it is Riversley!’ I turned away, hurt even to a sense of smarting pain,
without knowing the cause. I dare say it is true, as the girl declared
subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit. I dropped, and I may
have rolled my body and cried. An indefinite resentment at Riversley
was the feeling I grew conscious of after very fast walking. I would not
have accepted breakfast there.

About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her
people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set up
a cry, ‘Kiomi! Kiomi!’ like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth
made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The
strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a
word, rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all
round,--not musical, but catching and incessant,--gave me an idea that
I had fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones. They
welcomed me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second
or so. I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a
fire in the middle of the tent.

Kiomi was my companion’s name. She had sisters Adeline and Eveleen, and
brothers Osric and William, and she had a cousin a prizefighter. ‘That’s
what I’ll be,’ said I. Fiddling for money was not a prospect that
charmed me, though it was pleasant lying in Kiomi’s arms to hear Osric
play us off to sleep; it was like floating down one of a number of
visible rivers; I could see them converging and breaking away while I
floated smoothly, and a wonderful fair country nodded drowsy. From that
to cock-crow at a stride. Sleep was no more than the passage through the
arch of a canal. Kiomi and I were on the heath before sunrise, jumping
gravel-pits, chasing sandpipers, mimicking pewits; it seemed to me I had
only just heard the last of Osric’s fiddle when yellow colour filled in
along the sky over Riversley. The curious dark thrill of the fiddle in
the tent by night seemed close up behind the sun, and my quiet fancies
as I lay dropping to sleep, followed me like unobtrusive shadows during
daylight, or, to speak truthfully, till about dinner-time, when I
thought of nothing but the great stew-pot. We fed on plenty; nicer food
than Rippenger’s, minus puddings. After dinner I was ready for mischief.
My sensations on seeing Kiomi beg of a gentleman were remarkable. I
reproached her. She showed me sixpence shining in the palm of her hand.
I gave her a shilling to keep her from it. She had now got one and
sixpence, she said: meaning, I supposed upon reflection, that her
begging had produced that sum, and therefore it was a good thing. The
money remaining in my pocket amounted to five shillings and a penny.
I offered it to Kiomi’s mother, who refused to accept it; so did the
father, and Osric also. I might think of them, they observed, on my
return to my own house: they pointed at Riversley. ‘No,’ said I, ‘I
shan’t go there, you may be sure.’ The women grinned, and the men
yawned. The business of the men appeared to be to set to work about
everything as if they had a fire inside them, and then to stretch out
their legs and lie on their backs, exactly as if the fire had gone out.
Excepting Osric’s practice on the fiddle, and the father’s bringing in
and leading away of horses, they did little work in my sight but brown
themselves in the sun. One morning Osric’s brother came to our camp with
their cousin the prizefighter--a young man of lighter complexion, upon
whom I gazed, remembering John Thresher’s reverence for the heroical
profession. Kiomi whispered some story concerning her brother having
met the tramp. I did not listen; I was full of a tempest, owing to two
causes: a studious admiration of the smart young prizefighter’s person,
and wrathful disgust at him for calling Kiomi his wife, and telling her
he was prepared to marry her as soon as she played her harp like King
David. The intense folly of his asking a girl to play like David made me
despise him, but he was splendidly handsome and strong, and to see him
put on the gloves for a spar with big William, Kiomi’s brother, and
evade and ward the huge blows, would have been a treat to others besides
old John of Dipwell Farm. He had the agile grace of a leopard; his
waistcoat reminded me of one; he was like a piece of machinery in free
action. Pleased by my enthusiasm, he gave me a lesson, promising me
more.

‘He’ll be champion some day,’ said Kiomi, at gnaw upon an apple he had
given her.

I knocked the apple on the ground, and stamped on it. She slapped
my cheek. In a minute we stood in a ring. I beheld the girl actually
squaring at me.

‘Fight away,’ I said, to conceal my shame, and imagining I could slip
from her hits as easily as the prizefighter did from big William’s. I
was mistaken.

‘Oh! you think I can’t defend myself,’ said Kiomi; and rushed in with
one, two, quick as a cat, and cool as a statue.

‘Fight, my merry one; she takes punishment,’ the prizefighter sang out.
‘First blood to you, Kiomi; uncork his claret, my duck; straight at the
nozzle, he sees more lamps than shine in London, I warrant. Make him
lively, cook him; tell him who taught you; a downer to him, and I’ll
marry you to-morrow!’

I conceived a fury against her as though she had injured me by appearing
the man’s property--and I was getting the worst of it; her little fists
shot straight and hard as bars of iron; she liked fighting; she was at
least my match. To avoid the disgrace of seriously striking her, or of
being beaten at an open exchange of blows, I made a feint, and caught
her by the waist and threw her, not very neatly, for I fell myself in
her grip. They had to pluck her from me by force.

‘And you’ve gone a course of tuition in wrestling, squire?’ the
prizefighter said to me rather savagely.

The others were cordial, and did not snarl at me for going to the ropes,
as he called it. Kiomi desired to renew the conflict. I said aloud:

‘I never fight girls, and I tell you I don’t like their licking me.’

‘Then you come down to the river and wash your face,’ said she, and
pulled me by the fingers, and when she had washed my face clear of
blood, kissed me. I thought she tasted of the prizefighter.

Late in the afternoon Osric proposed that he and I and the prizefighter
should take a walk. I stipulated for Kiomi to be of the party, which
was allowed, and the gipsy-women shook my hand as though I had been
departing on a long expedition, entreating me not to forget them, and
never to think evil of poor gipsy-folk.

‘Why, I mean to stay with you,’ said I.

They grinned delightedly, and said I must be back to see them break up
camp in the evening. Every two or three minutes Kiomi nudged my
elbow and pointed behind, where I saw the women waving their coloured
neckerchiefs. Out of sight of our tents we came in view of the tramp.
Kiomi said, ‘Hide!’ I dived into a furze dell. The tramp approached,
calling out for news of me. Now at Rippenger’s school, thanks to Heriot,
lying was not the fashion; still I had heard boys lie, and they can let
it out of their mouths like a fish, so lively, simple, and solid, that
you could fancy a master had asked them for it and they answered, ‘There
it is.’ But boys cannot lie in one key spontaneously, a number of them
to the same effect, as my friends here did. I was off, they said; all
swung round to signify the direction of my steps; my plans were hinted
at; particulars were not stated on the plea that there should be no
tellings; it was remarked that I ought to have fair play and ‘law.’
Kiomi said she hoped he would not catch me. The tramp winced with
vexation, and the gipsies chaffed him. I thanked them in my heart for
their loyal conduct. Creeping under cover of the dell I passed round to
the road over a knoll of firs as quick as my feet could carry me, and
had just cried, ‘Now I’m safe’; when a lady stepping from a carriage
on the road, caught me in her arms and hugged me blind. It was my aunt
Dorothy.



CHAPTER VIII. JANET ILCHESTER

I was a prisoner, captured by fraud, and with five shillings and a penny
still remaining to me for an assurance of my power to enjoy freedom.
Osric and Kiomi did not show themselves on the road, they answered none
of my shouts.

‘She is afraid to look me in the face,’ I said, keeping my anger on
Kiomi.

‘Harry, Harry,’ said my aunt, ‘they must have seen me here; do you
grieve, and you have me, dear?’

Her eager brown eyes devoured me while I stood panting to be happy, if
only I might fling my money at Kiomi’s feet, and tell her, ‘There, take
all I have; I hate you!’ One minute I was curiously perusing the soft
shade of a moustache on my aunt’s upper lip; the next, we jumped into
the carriage, and she was my dear aunt Dorothy again, and the world
began rolling another way.

The gipsies had made an appointment to deliver me over to my aunt;
Farmer Eckerthy had spoken of me to my grandfather; the tramp had
fetched Mr. Rippenger on the scene. Rippenger paid the tramp, I dare
say; my grandfather paid Rippenger’s bill and for Saddlebank’s goose;
my aunt paid the gipsies, and I think it doubtful that they handed the
tramp a share, so he came to the end of his list of benefits from not
asking questions.

I returned to Riversley more of a man than most boys of my age, and
more of a child. A small child would not have sulked as I did at Kiomi’s
behaviour; but I met my grandfather’s ridiculous politeness with a man’s
indifference.

‘So you’re back, sir, are you!’

‘I am, sir.’

‘Ran like a hare, ‘stead of a fox, eh?’

‘I didn’t run like either, sir.’

‘Do you ride?’

‘Yes, sir; a horse.’

That was his greeting and how I took it. I had not run away from him, so
I had a quiet conscience.

He said, shortly after, ‘Look here; your name is Harry Richmond in my
house--do you understand? My servants have orders to call you Master
Harry Richmond, according to your christening. You were born here, sir,
you will please to recollect. I’ll have no vagabond names here’--he
puffed himself hot, muttering, ‘Nor vagabond airs neither.’

I knew very well what it meant. A sore spirit on my father’s behalf kept
me alive to any insult of him; and feeling that we were immeasurably
superior to the Beltham blood, I merely said, apart to old Sewis,
shrugging my shoulders, ‘The squire expects me to recollect where I was
born. I’m not likely to forget his nonsense.’

Sewis, in reply, counselled me to direct a great deal of my attention to
the stables, and drink claret with the squire in the evening, things so
little difficult to do that I moralized reflectively, ‘Here ‘s a way
of gaining a relative’s affection!’ The squire’s punctilious regard for
payments impressed me, it is true. He had saved me from the disgrace of
owing money to my detested schoolmaster; and, besides, I was under his
roof, eating of his bread. My late adventurous life taught me that I
incurred an obligation by it. Kiomi was the sole victim of my anger that
really seemed to lie down to be trampled on, as she deserved for her
unpardonable treachery.

By degrees my grandfather got used to me, and commenced saying
in approval of certain of my performances, ‘There’s Beltham in
that--Beltham in that!’ Once out hunting, I took a nasty hedge and ditch
in front of him; he bawled proudly, ‘Beltham all over!’ and praised me.
At night, drinking claret, he said on a sudden, ‘And, egad, Harry, you
must jump your head across hedges and ditches, my little fellow. It
won’t do, in these confounded days, to have you clever all at the wrong
end. In my time, good in the saddle was good for everything; but now you
must get your brains where you can--pick here, pick there--and sell ‘em
like a huckster; some do. Nature’s gone--it’s damned artifice rules, I
tell ye; and a squire of our country must be three parts lawyer to keep
his own. You must learn; by God, sir, you must cogitate; you must stew
at books and maps, or you’ll have some infernal upstart taking the
lead of you, and leaving you nothing but the whiff of his tail.’ He
concluded, ‘I’m glad to see you toss down your claret, my boy.’

Thus I grew in his favour, till I heard from him that I was to be the
heir of Riversley and his estates, but on one condition, which he did
not then mention. If I might have spoken to him of my father, I should
have loved him. As it was, I liked old Sewis better, for he would talk
to me of the night when my father carried me away, and though he never
uttered the flattering words I longed to hear, he repeated the story
often, and made the red hall glow with beams of my father’s image. My
walks and rides were divided between the road he must have followed
toward London, bearing me in his arms, and the vacant place of Kiomi’s
camp. Kiomi stood for freedom, pointing into the darkness I wished
to penetrate that I might find him. If I spoke of him to my aunt she
trembled. She said, ‘Yes, Harry, tell me all you are thinking about,
whatever you want to know’; but her excessive trembling checked me, and
I kept my feelings to myself--a boy with a puzzle in his head and hunger
in his heart. At times I rode out to the utmost limit of the hour giving
me the proper number of minutes to race back and dress for dinner at
the squire’s table, and a great wrestling I had with myself to turn my
little horse’s head from hills and valleys lying East; they seemed
to have the secret of my father. Blank enough they looked if ever I
despaired of their knowing more than I. My Winter and Summer were the
moods of my mind constantly shifting. I would have a week of the belief
that he was near Riversley, calling for me; a week of the fear that he
was dead; long dreams of him, as travelling through foreign countries,
patting the foreheads of boys and girls on his way; or driving
radiantly, and people bowing. Radiantly, I say: had there been touches
of colour in these visions, I should have been lured off in pursuit
of him. The dreams passed colourlessly; I put colouring touches to the
figures seen in them afterward, when I was cooler, and could say, ‘What
is the use of fancying things?’ yet knew that fancying things was a
consolation. By such means I came to paint the mystery surrounding my
father in tender colours. I built up a fretted cathedral from what
I imagined of him, and could pass entirely away out of the world by
entering the doors.

Want of boys’ society as well as hard head-work produced this mischief.
My lessons were intermittent Resident tutors arrived to instruct me, one
after another. They were clergymen, and they soon proposed to marry my
aunt Dorothy, or they rebuked the squire for swearing. The devil was in
the parsons, he said: in his time they were modest creatures and stuck
to the bottle and heaven. My aunt was of the opinion of our neighbours,
who sent their boys to school and thought I should be sent likewise.

‘No, no,’ said the squire; ‘my life’s short when the gout’s marching up
to my middle, and I’ll see as much of my heir as I can. Why, the lad’s
my daughter’s son: He shall grow up among his tenantry. We’ll beat the
country and start a man at last to drive his yard of learning into him
without rolling sheep’s eyes right and left.’

Unfortunately the squire’s description of man was not started. My aunt
was handsome, an heiress (that is, she had money of her own coming from
her mother’s side of the family), and the tenderest woman alive, with
a voice sweeter than flutes. There was a saying in the county that to
marry a Beltham you must po’chay her.

A great-aunt of mine, the squire’s sister, had been carried off. She
died childless. A favourite young cousin of his likewise had run away
with a poor baronet, Sir Roderick Ilchester, whose son Charles was now
and then our playmate, and was a scapegrace. But for me he would
have been selected by the squire for his heir, he said; and he often
‘confounded’ me to my face on that account as he shook my hand, breaking
out: ‘I’d as lief fetch you a cuff o’ the head, Harry Richmond, upon my
honour!’ and cursing at his luck for having to study for his living, and
be what he called a sloppy curate now that I had come to Riversley for
good.

He informed me that I should have to marry his sister Janet; for that
they could not allow the money to go out of the family. Janet Ilchester
was a quaint girl, a favourite of my aunt Dorothy, and the squire’s
especial pet; red-cheeked, with a good upright figure in walking and
riding, and willing to be friendly, but we always quarrelled: she
detested hearing of Kiomi.

‘Don’t talk of creatures you met when you were a beggar, Harry
Richmond,’ she said.

‘I never was a beggar,’ I replied.

‘Then she was a beggar,’ said Janet; and I could not deny it; though
the only difference I saw between Janet and Kiomi was, that Janet
continually begged favours and gifts of people she knew, and Kiomi of
people who were strangers.

My allowance of pocket-money from the squire was fifty pounds a year. I
might have spent it all in satisfying Janet’s wishes for riding-whips,
knives, pencil-cases, cairngorm buttons, and dogs. A large part of the
money went that way. She was always getting notice of fine dogs for
sale. I bought a mastiff for her, a brown retriever, and a little
terrier. She was permitted to keep the terrier at home, but I had to
take care of the mastiff and retriever. When Janet came to look at them
she called them by their names; of course they followed me in preference
to her; she cried with jealousy. We had a downright quarrel. Lady
Ilchester invited me to spend a day at her house, Charley being home
for his Midsummer holidays. Charley, Janet, and I fished the river for
trout, and Janet, to flatter me (of which I was quite aware), while
I dressed her rod as if she was likely to catch something, talked of
Heriot, and then said:

‘Oh! dear, we are good friends, aren’t we? Charley says we shall marry
one another some day, but mama’s such a proud woman she won’t much like
your having such a father as you ‘ve got unless he ‘s dead by that time
and I needn’t go up to him to be kissed.’

I stared at the girl in wonderment, but not too angrily, for I guessed
that she was merely repeating her brother’s candid speculations upon
the future. I said: ‘Now mind what I tell you, Janet: I forgive you
this once, for you are an ignorant little girl and know no better. Speak
respectfully of my father or you never see me again.’

Here Charley sang out: ‘Hulloa! you don’t mean to say you’re talking of
your father.’

Janet whimpered that I had called her an ignorant little girl. If she
had been silent I should have pardoned her. The meanness of the girl
in turning on me when the glaring offence was hers, struck me as
contemptible beyond words. Charley and I met half way. He advised me not
to talk to his sister of my father. They all knew, he said, that it was
no fault of mine, and for his part, had he a rascal for a father, he
should pension him and cut him; to tell the truth, no objection against
me existed in his family except on the score of the sort of father I
owned to, and I had better make up my mind to shake him off before I
grew a man; he spoke as a friend. I might frown at him and clench my
fists, but he did speak as a friend.

Janet all the while was nibbling a biscuit, glancing over it at me with
mouse-eyes. Her short frock and her greediness, contrasting with the
talk of my marrying her, filled me with renewed scorn, though my heart
was sick at the mention of my father. I asked her what she knew of him.
She nibbled her biscuit, mumbling, ‘He went to Riversley, pretending he
was a singing-master. I know that’s true, and more.’

‘Oh, and a drawing-master, and a professor of legerdemain,’ added her
brother. ‘Expunge him, old fellow; he’s no good.’

‘No, I’m sure he’s no good,’ said Janet.

I took her hand, and told her, ‘You don’t know how you hurt me; but
you’re a child: you don’t know anything about the world. I love
my father, remember that, and what you want me to do is mean and
disgraceful; but you don’t know better. I would forfeit everything in
the world for him. And when you’re of age to marry, marry anybody you
like--you won’t marry me. And good-bye, Janet. Think of learning your
lessons, and not of marrying. I can’t help laughing.’ So I said, but
without the laughter. Her brother tried hard to get me to notice him.

Janet betook herself to the squire. Her prattle of our marriage in days
to come was excuseable. It was the squire’s notion. He used to remark
generally that he liked to see things look safe and fast, and he had,
as my aunt confided to me, arranged with Lady Ilchester, in the girl’s
hearing, that we should make a match. My grandfather pledged his word to
Janet that he would restore us to an amicable footing. He thought it a
light task. Invitations were sent out to a large party at Riversley, and
Janet came with all my gifts on her dress or in her pockets. The squire
led the company to the gates of his stables; the gates opened, and a
beautiful pony, with a side-saddle on, was trotted forth, amid cries of
admiration. Then the squire put the bridle-reins in my hands, bidding me
present it myself. I asked the name of the person. He pointed at Janet.
I presented the pony to Janet, and said, ‘It’s from the squire.’

She forgot, in her delight, our being at variance.

‘No, no, you stupid Harry, I’m to thank you. He’s a darling pony. I want
to kiss you.’

I retired promptly, but the squire had heard her.

‘Back, sir!’ he shouted, swearing by this and that. ‘You slink from a
kiss, and you’re Beltham blood?

Back to her, lad. Take it. Up with her in your arms or down on your
knees. Take it manfully, somehow. See there, she ‘s got it ready for
you.’

‘I’ve got a letter ready for you, Harry, to say--oh! so sorry for
offending you,’ Janet whispered, when I reached the pony’s head; ‘and if
you’d rather not be kissed before people, then by-and-by, but do shake
hands.’

‘Pull the pony’s mane,’ said I; ‘that will do as well. Observe--I pull,
and now you pull.’

Janet mechanically followed my actions. She grimaced, and whimpered, ‘I
could pull the pony’s mane right out.’

‘Don’t treat animals like your dolls,’ said I.

She ran to the squire, and refused the pony. The squire’s face changed
from merry to black.

‘Young man,’ he addressed me, ‘don’t show that worse half of yours in
genteel society, or, by the Lord! you won’t carry Beltham buttons for
long. This young lady, mind you, is a lady by birth both sides.’

‘She thinks she is marriageable,’ said I; and walked away, leaving loud
laughter behind me.

But laughter did not console me for the public aspersion of him I loved.
I walked off the grounds, and thought to myself it was quite time I
should be moving. Wherever I stayed for any length of time I was certain
to hear abuse of my father. Why not wander over the country with Kiomi,
go to sea, mount the Andes, enlist in a Prussian regiment, and hear the
soldiers tell tales of Frederick the Great? I walked over Kiomi’s heath
till dark, when one of our grooms on horseback overtook me, saying that
the squire begged me to jump on the horse and ride home as quick as
possible. Two other lads and the coachman were out scouring the country
to find me, and the squire was anxious, it appeared. I rode home like a
wounded man made to feel proud by victory, but with no one to stop the
bleeding of his wounds: and the more my pride rose, the more I suffered
pain. There at home sat my grandfather, dejected, telling me that the
loss of me a second time would kill him, begging me to overlook his
roughness, calling me his little Harry and his heir, his brave-spirited
boy; yet I was too sure that a word of my father to him would have
brought him very near another ejaculation concerning Beltham buttons.

‘You’re a fiery young fellow, I suspect,’ he said, when he had recovered
his natural temper. ‘I like you for it; pluck’s Beltham. Have a will of
your own. Sweat out the bad blood. Here, drink my health, Harry. You’re
three parts Beltham, at least, and it’ll go hard if you’re not all
Beltham before I die. Old blood always wins that race, I swear. We ‘re
the oldest in the county.

Damn the mixing. My father never let any of his daughters marry, if he
could help it, nor’ll I, bar rascals.

Here’s to you, young Squire Beltham. Harry Lepel Beltham--does that
suit ye? Anon, anon, as they say in the play. Take my name, and drop the
Richmond no, drop the subject: we’ll talk of it by-and-by.’

So he wrestled to express his hatred of my father without offending
me; and I studied him coldly, thinking that the sight of my father in
beggar’s clothes, raising a hand for me to follow his steps, would draw
me forth, though Riversley should beseech me to remain clad in wealth.



CHAPTER IX. AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED

A dream that my father lay like a wax figure in a bed gave me thoughts
of dying. I was ill and did not know it, and imagined that my despair at
the foot of the stairs of ever reaching my room to lie down peacefully
was the sign of death. My aunt Dorothy nursed me for a week: none but
she and my dogs entered the room. I had only two faint wishes left in
me: one that the squire should be kept out of my sight, the other that
she would speak to me of my mother’s love for my father. She happened to
say, musing, ‘Harry, you have your mother’s heart.’

I said, ‘No, my father’s.’

From that we opened a conversation, the sweetest I had ever had away
from him, though she spoke shyly and told me very little. It was enough
for me in the narrow world of my dogs’ faces, and the red-leaved creeper
at the window, the fir-trees on the distant heath, and her hand clasping
mine. My father had many faults, she said, but he had been cruelly used,
or deceived, and he bore a grievous burden; and then she said, ‘Yes,’
and ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes,’ in the voice one supposes of a ghost retiring,
to my questions of his merits. I was refreshed and satisfied, like the
parched earth with dews when it gets no rain, and I was soon well.

When I walked among the household again, I found that my week of
seclusion had endowed me with a singular gift; I found that I could
see through everybody. Looking at the squire, I thought to myself, ‘My
father has faults, but he has been cruelly used,’ and immediately I
forgave the old man; his antipathy to my father seemed a craze, and to
account for it I lay in wait for his numerous illogical acts and words,
and smiled visibly in contemplation of his rough unreasonable nature,
and of my magnanimity. He caught the smile, and interpreted it.

‘Grinning at me, Harry; have I made a slip in my grammar, eh?’

Who could feel any further sensitiveness at his fits of irritation,
reading him as I did? I saw through my aunt: she was always in dread of
a renewal of our conversation. I could see her ideas flutter like birds
to escape me. And I penetrated the others who came in my way just as
unerringly. Farmer Eckerthy would acknowledge, astonished, his mind was
running on cricket when I taxed him with it.

‘Crops was the cart-load of my thoughts, Master Harry, but there was a
bit o’ cricket in it, too, ne’er a doubt.’

My aunt’s maid, Davis, was shocked by my discernment of the fact that
she was in love, and it was useless for her to pretend the contrary, for
I had seen her granting tender liberties to Lady Ilchester’s footman.

Old Sewis said gravely, ‘You’ve been to the witches, Master Harry’; and
others were sure ‘I had got it from the gipsies off the common.’

The maids were partly incredulous, but I perceived that they disbelieved
as readily as they believed. With my latest tutor, the Rev. Simon Hart,
I was not sufficiently familiar to offer him proofs of my extraordinary
power; so I begged favours of him, and laid hot-house flowers on his
table in the name of my aunt, and had the gratification of seeing him
blush. His approval of my Latin exercise was verbal, and weak praise
in comparison; besides I cared nothing for praises not referring to my
grand natural accomplishment. ‘And my father now is thinking of me!’
That was easy to imagine, but the certainty of it confirmed me in my
conceit.

‘How can you tell?--how is it possible for you to know people’s
thoughts?’ said Janet Ilchester, whose head was as open to me as a hat.
She pretended to be rather more frightened of me than she was.

‘And now you think you are flattering me!’ I said.

She looked nervous.

‘And now you’re asking yourself what you can do better than I can!’

She said, ‘Go on.’

I stopped.

She charged me with being pulled up short.

I denied it.

‘Guess, guess!’ said she. ‘You can’t.’

My reply petrified her. ‘You were thinking that you are a lady by birth
on both sides.’

At first she refused to admit it. ‘No, it wasn’t that, Harry, it wasn’t
really. I was thinking how clever you are.’

‘Yes, after, not before.’

‘No, Harry, but you are clever. I wish I was half as clever. Fancy
reading people’s ideas! I can read my pony’s, but that’s different; I
know by his ears. And as for my being a lady, of course I am, and so are
you--I mean, a gentleman. I was thinking--now this is really what I was
thinking--I wished your father lived near, that we might all be friends.
I can’t bear the squire when he talks.... And you quite as good as me,
and better. Don’t shake me off, Harry.’

I shook her in the gentlest manner, not suspecting that she had read my
feelings fully as well as I her thoughts. Janet and I fell to talking of
my father incessantly, and were constantly together. The squire caught
one of my smiles rising, when he applauded himself lustily for the
original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful
to me. It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife
who would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the
globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be
the preferable person. I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her
brother Charley the subject we conversed on.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said she, and told him straightway.

Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire’s
table: ‘So, Harry Richmond, you’re the cleverest fellow in the world,
are you? There’s Janet telling everybody your father’s the cleverest
next to you, and she’s never seen him!’

‘How? hulloa, what ‘s that?’ sang out the squire.

‘Charley was speaking of my father, sir,’ I said, preparing for thunder.

We all rose. The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were
coming on.

‘Don’t sit at my table again,’ he said, after a terrible struggle to be
articulate.

His hand was stretched at me. I swung round to depart. ‘No, no, not you;
that fellow,’ he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.

I tried to intercede--the last who should have done it.

‘You like to hear him, eh?’ said the squire.

I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when
occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the
squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.

‘Biter’s bit. I’ve dished myself, that’s clear,’ said Charley; and he
spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.

He and Janet were staying at Riversley. They left next morning, for the
squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.

‘I ‘ll tell you what; there ‘s no doubt about one thing,’ said Charley;
‘Janet’s right--some of those girls are tremendously deep: you’re about
the cleverest fellow I’ve ever met in my life. I thought of working into
the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the
Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for
me without much damaging you;--perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just
to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the
squire spoke of making me his heir--or words to that effect neatly
conjugated--before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that
Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower
biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on
Riversley--I ‘d betray my bosom friend. I’m regularly “hoist on my own
petard,” as they say in the newspapers. I’m a curate and no mistake. You
did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat
boxing. I bear no malice when I’m floored neatly.’

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me
to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his
overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and
a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I
pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with
suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other
Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father’s
society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the
deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased
to covet. At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was
alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and
becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them
for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the
ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus
Temple’s father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.
Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded,
and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity,
and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain
well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He
confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared,
was working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat
down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent
Cicero. I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon
prove himself the better scholar. ‘There’s my old Richie!’ said Temple,
fondling me on the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me
at once.

We roamed the neighbourhood talking old school-days over, visiting
houses, hunting and dancing, declaring every day we would write for
Heriot to join us, instead of which we wrote a valentine to Julia
Rippenger, and despatched a companion one composed in a very different
spirit to her father. Lady Ilchester did us the favour to draw a
sea-monster, an Andromeda, and a Perseus in the shape of a flying
British hussar, for Julia’s valentine. It seemed to us so successful
that we scattered half-a-dozen over the neighbourhood, and rode round it
on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day to see the effect of them,
meeting the postman on the road. He gave me two for myself. One was
transparently from Janet, a provoking counterstroke of mine to her; but
when I opened the other my heart began beating. The standard of Great
Britain was painted in colours at the top; down each side, encricled in
laurels, were kings and queens of England with their sceptres, and
in the middle I read the initials, A. F-G. R. R., embedded in blue
forget-me-hots. I could not doubt it was from my father. Riding out in
the open air as I received it, I could fancy in my hot joy that it had
dropped out of heaven.

‘He’s alive; I shall have him with me; I shall have him with me soon!’ I
cried to Temple. ‘Oh! why can’t I answer him? where is he? what address?
Let’s ride to London. Don’t you understand, Temple? This letter’s from
my father. He knows I’m here. I’ll find him, never mind what happens.’

‘Yes, but,’ said Temple, ‘if he knows where you are, and you don’t know
where he is, there’s no good in your going off adventuring. If a fellow
wants to be hit, the best thing he can do is to stop still.’

Struck by the perspicacity of his views, I turned homeward. Temple
had been previously warned by me to avoid speaking of my father at
Riversley; but I was now in such a boiling state of happiness, believing
that my father would certainly appear as he had done at Dipwell farm,
brilliant and cheerful, to bear me away to new scenes and his own
dear society, that I tossed the valentine to my aunt across the
breakfast-table, laughing and telling her to guess the name of the
sender. My aunt flushed.

‘Miss Bannerbridge?’ she said.

A stranger was present. The squire introduced us.

‘My grandson, Harry Richmond, Captain William Bulsted, frigate
Polyphemus; Captain Bulsted, Master Augustus Temple.’

For the sake of conversation, Temple asked him if his ship was fully
manned.

‘All but a mate,’ said the captain.

I knew him by reputation as the brother of Squire Gregory Bulsted of
Bulsted, notorious for his attachment to my aunt, and laughing-stock of
the county.

‘So you’ve got a valentine,’ the captain addressed me. ‘I went on shore
at Rio last year on this very day of the month, just as lively as
you youngsters for one. Saltwater keeps a man’s youth in pickle. No
valentine for me! Paid off my ship yesterday at Spithead, and here I am
again on Valentine’s Day.’

Temple and I stared hard at a big man with a bronzed skin and a rubicund
laugh who expected to receive valentines.

My aunt thrust the letter back to me secretly. ‘It must be from a lady,’
said she.

‘Why, who’d have a valentine from any but a lady?’ exclaimed the
captain.

The squire winked at me to watch his guest. Captain Bulsted fed
heartily; he was thoroughly a sailor-gentleman, between the old school
and the new, and, as I perceived, as far gone in love with my aunt as
his brother was. Presently Sewis entered carrying a foaming tankard of
old ale, and he and the captain exchanged a word or two upon Jamaica.

‘Now, when you’ve finished that washy tea of yours, take a draught of
our October, brewed here long before you were a lieutenant, captain,’
said the squire.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the captain replied; ‘I know that ale; a moment, and
I will gladly. I wish to preserve my faculties; I don’t wish to have it
supposed that I speak under fermenting influences. Sewis, hold by, if
you please.’

My aunt made an effort to retire.

‘No, no, fair play; stay,’ said the squire, trying to frown, but
twinkling; my aunt tried to smile, and sat as if on springs.

‘Miss Beltham,’ the captain bowed to her, and to each one as he spoke,
‘Squire Beltham, Mr. Harry Richmond; Mr. Temple; my ship was paid off
yesterday, and till a captain’s ship is paid off, he ‘s not his own
master, you are aware. If you think my behaviour calls for comment,
reflect, I beseech you, on the nature of a sailor’s life. A three-years’
cruise in a cabin is pretty much equivalent to the same amount of time
spent in a coffin, I can assure you; with the difference that you’re
hard at work thinking all the time like the--hum.’

‘Ay, he thinks hard enough,’ the squire struck in.

‘Pardon me, sir; like the--hum--plumb-line on a leeshore, I meant to
observe. This is now the third--the fourth occasion on which I have
practised the observance of paying my first visit to Riversley to know
my fate, that I might not have it on my conscience that I had missed a
day, a minute, as soon as I was a free man on English terra firma. My
brother Greg and I were brought up in close association with Riversley.
One of the Beauties of Riversley we lost! One was left, and we both
tried our luck with her; honourably, in turn, each of us, nothing
underhand; above-board, on the quarter-deck, before all the company. I
‘ll say it of my brother, I can say it of myself. Greg’s chances, I need
not remark, are superior to mine; he is always in port. If he wins, then
I tell him--“God bless you, my boy; you’ve won the finest woman, the
handsomest, and the best, in or out of Christendom!” But my chance is
my property, though it may be value only one farthing coin of the realm,
and there is always pity for poor sinners in the female bosom. Miss
Beltham, I trespass on your kind attention. If I am to remain a bachelor
and you a maiden lady, why, the will of heaven be done! If you marry
another, never mind who the man, there’s my stock to the fruit of the
union, never mind what the sex. But, if you will have one so unworthy of
you as me, my hand and heart are at your feet, ma’am, as I have lost no
time in coming to tell you.’ So Captain Bulsted concluded. Our eyes were
directed on my aunt. The squire bade her to speak out, for she had his
sanction to act according to her judgement and liking.

She said, with a gracefulness that gave me a little aching of pity for
the poor captain: ‘I am deeply honoured by you, Captain Bulsted, but it
is not my intention to marry.’

The captain stood up, and bowing humbly, replied ‘I am ever your
servant, ma’am.’

My aunt quitted the room.

‘Now for the tankard, Sewis,’ said the captain.

Gradually the bottom of the great tankard turned up to the ceiling. He
drank to the last drop in it.

The squire asked him whether he found consolation in that.

The captain sighed prodigiously and said: ‘It ‘s a commencement, sir.’

‘Egad, it’s a commencement ‘d be something like a final end to any dozen
of our fellows round about here. I’ll tell you what: if stout stomachs
gained the day in love-affairs, I suspect you’d run a good race against
the male half of our county, William. And a damned good test of a man’s
metal, I say it is! What are you going to do to-day?’

‘I am going to get drunk, sir.’

‘Well, you might do worse. Then, stop here, William, and give my old
Port the preference. No tongue in the morning, I promise you, and
pleasant dreams at night.’ The captain thanked him cordially, but
declined, saying that he would rather make a beast of himself in another
place.

The squire vainly pressed his hospitality by assuring him of perfect
secresy on our part, as regarded my aunt, and offering him Sewis and one
of the footmen to lift him to bed. ‘You are very good, squire,’ said the
captain; ‘nothing but a sense of duty restrains me. I am bound to convey
the information to my brother that the coast is clear for him.’

‘Well, then, fall light, and for’ard,’ said the squire, shaking him by
the hand. Forty years ago a gentleman, a baronet, had fallen on the back
of his head and never recovered.

‘Ay, ay, launch stern foremost, if you like!’ said the captain, nodding;
‘no, no, I don’t go into port pulled by the tail, my word for it,
squire; and good day to you, sir.’

‘No ill will about this bothering love-business of yours, William?’

‘On my soul, sir, I cherish none.’

Temple and I followed him out of the house, fascinated by his manners
and oddness. He invited us to jump into the chariot beside him. We were
witnesses of the meeting between him and his brother, a little sniffling
man, as like the captain as a withered nut is like a milky one.

‘Same luck, William?’ said Squire Gregory.

‘Not a point of change in the wind, Greg,’ said the captain.

They wrenched hands thereupon, like two carpet-shakers, with a report,
and much in a similar attitude.

‘These young gentlemen will testify to you solemnly, Greg, that I took
no unfair advantage,’ said the captain; ‘no whispering in passages, no
appointments in gardens, no letters. I spoke out. Bravely, man! And now,
Greg, referring to the state of your cellar, our young friends here
mean to float with us to-night. It is now half-past eleven A.M. Your
dinner-hour the same as usual, of course? Therefore at four P.M. the
hour of execution. And come, Greg, you and I will visit the cellar. A
dozen and half of light and half-a-dozen of the old family--that will be
about the number of bottles to give me my quietus, and you yours--all of
us! And you, young gentlemen, take your guns or your rods, and back and
be dressed by the four bell, or you ‘ll not find the same man in Billy
Bulsted.’

Temple was enraptured with him. He declared he had been thinking
seriously for a long time of entering the Navy, and his admiration of
the captain must have given him an intuition of his character, for
he persuaded me to send to Riversley for our evening-dress clothes,
appearing in which at the dinner-table, we received the captain’s
compliments, as being gentlemen who knew how to attire ourselves to
suit an occasion. The occasion, Squire Gregory said, happened to him too
often for him to distinguish it by the cut of his coat.

‘I observe, nevertheless, Greg, that you have a black tie round your
neck instead of a red one,’ said the captain.

‘Then it came there by accident,’ said Squire Gregory.

‘Accident! There’s no such thing as accident. If I wander out of the
house with a half dozen or so in me, and topple into the brook, am I
accidentally drowned? If a squall upsets my ship, is she an accidental
residue of spars and timber and old iron? If a woman refuses me, is that
an accident? There’s a cause for every disaster: too much cargo, want of
foresight, want of pluck. Pooh! when I’m hauled prisoner into a foreign
port in time of war, you may talk of accidents. Mr. Harry Richmond, Mr.
Temple, I have the accidental happiness of drinking to your healths in a
tumbler of hock wine. Nominative, hic, haec, hoc.’

Squire Gregory carried on the declension, not without pride. The
Vocative confused him.

‘Claret will do for the Vocative,’ said the captain, gravely; ‘the more
so as there is plenty of it at your table, Greg. Ablative hoc, hac, hoc,
which sounds as if the gentleman had become incapable of speech beyond
the name of his wine. So we will abandon the declension of the article
for a dash of champagne, which there’s no declining, I hope. Wonderful
men, those Romans! They fought their ships well, too. A question to you,
Greg. Those heathen Pagan dogs had a religion that encouraged them to
swear. Now, my experience of life pronounces it to be a human necessity
to rap out an oath here and there. What do you say?’

Squire Gregory said: ‘Drinking, and no thinking, at dinner, William.’
The captain pledged him.

‘I ‘ll take the opportunity, as we’re not on board ship, of drinking
to you, sir, now,’ Temple addressed the captain, whose face was
resplendent; and he bowed, and drank, and said,

‘As we are not on board ship? I like you!’

Temple thanked him for the compliment.

‘No compliment, my lad. You see me in my weakness, and you have the
discernment to know me for something better than I seem. You promise
to respect me on my own quarter-deck. You are of the right stuff. Do I
speak correctly, Mr. Harry?’

‘Temple is my dear friend,’ I replied.

‘And he would not be so if not of the right stuff! Good! That ‘s a way
of putting much in little. By Jove! a royal style.’

‘And Harry’s a royal fellow!’ said Temple.

We all drank to one another. The captain’s eyes scrutinized me
speculatingly.

‘This boy might have been yours or mine, Greg,’ I heard him say in a
faltering rough tone.

They forgot the presence of Temple and me, but spoke as if they thought
they were whispering. The captain assured his brother that Squire
Beltham had given him as much fair play as one who holds a balance.
Squire Gregory doubted it, and sipped and kept his nose at his
wineglass, crabbedly repeating his doubts of it. The captain then
remarked, that doubting it, his conscience permitted him to use
stratagems, though he, the captain, not doubting it, had no such
permission.

‘I count I run away with her every night of my life,’ said Squire
Gregory. ‘Nothing comes of it but empty bottles.’

‘Court her, serenade her,’ said the captain; ‘blockade the port, lay
siege to the citadel. I’d give a year of service for your chances, Greg.
Half a word from her, and you have your horses ready.’

‘She’s past po’chaises,’ Squire Gregory sighed.

‘She’s to be won by a bold stroke, brother Greg.’

‘Oh, Lord, no! She’s past po’chaises.’

‘Humph! it’s come to be half-bottle, half-beauty, with your worship,
Greg, I suspect.’

‘No. I tell you, William, she’s got her mind on that fellow. You can’t
po’chay her.’

‘After he jilted her for her sister? Wrong, Greg, wrong. You are
muddled. She has a fright about matrimony--a common thing at her age, I
am told. Where’s the man?’

‘In the Bench, of course. Where’d you have him?’

‘I, sir? If I knew my worst enemy to be there, I’d send him six dozen of
the best in my cellar.’

Temple shot a walnut at me. I pretended to be meditating carelessly, and
I had the heat and roar of a conflagration round my head.

Presently the captain said, ‘Are you sure the man’s in the Bench?’

‘Cock,’ Squire Gregory replied.

‘He had money from his wife.’

‘And he had the wheels to make it go.’ Here they whispered in earnest.

‘Oh, the Billings were as rich as the Belthams,’ said the captain,
aloud.

‘Pretty nigh, William.’

‘That’s our curse, Greg. Money settled on their male issue, and money
in hand; by the Lord! we’ve always had the look of a pair of highwaymen
lurking for purses, when it was the woman, the woman, penniless, naked,
mean, destitute; nothing but the woman we wanted. And there was one
apiece for us. Greg, old boy, when will the old county show such another
couple of Beauties! Greg, sir, you’re not half a man, or you’d have
carried her, with your opportunities. The fellow’s in the Bench, you
say? How are you cocksure of that, Mr. Greg?’

‘Company,’ was the answer; and the captain turned to Temple and me,
apologizing profusely for talking over family matters with his brother
after a separation of three years. I had guessed but hastily at the
subject of their conversation until they mentioned the Billings, the
family of my maternal grandmother. The name was like a tongue of fire
shooting up in a cloud of smoke: I saw at once that the man in the Bench
must be my father, though what the Bench was exactly, and where it was,
I had no idea, and as I was left to imagination I became, as usual,
childish in my notions, and brooded upon thoughts of the Man in the Iron
Mask; things I dared not breathe to Temple, of whose manly sense I stood
in awe when under these distracting influences.

‘Remember our feast in the combe?’ I sang across the table to him.

‘Never forget it!’ said he; and we repeated the tale of the goose at
Rippenger’s school to our entertainers, making them laugh.

‘And next morning Richie ran off with a gipsy girl,’ said Temple; and I
composed a narrative of my wanderings with Kiomi, much more amusing than
the real one. The captain vowed he would like to have us both on board
his ship, but that times were too bad for him to offer us a prospect of
promotion. ‘Spin round the decanters,’ said he; ‘now’s the hour for them
to go like a humming-top, and each man lend a hand: whip hard, my lads.
It’s once in three years, hurrah! and the cause is a cruel woman. Toast
her; but no name. Here’s to the nameless Fair! For it’s not my intention
to marry, says she, and, ma’am, I’m a man of honour or I’d catch you
tight, my nut-brown maid, and clap you into a cage, fal-lal, like a
squirrel; to trot the wheel of mat-trimony. Shame to the first man
down!’

‘That won’t be I,’ said Temple.

‘Be me, sir, me,’ the captain corrected his grammar.

‘Pardon me, Captain Bulsted; the verb “To be” governs the nominative
case in our climate,’ said Temple.

‘Then I’m nominative hic... I say, sir, I’m in the tropics, Mr. Tem ...
Mr. Tempus. Point of honour, not forget a man’s name. Rippenger, your
schoolmaster? Mr. Rippenger, you’ve knocked some knowledge into this
young gentleman.’ Temple and I took counsel together hastily; we cried
in a breath: ‘Here ‘s to Julia Rippenger, the prettiest, nicest girl
living!’ and we drank to her.

‘Julia!’ the captain echoed us. ‘I join your toast, gentlemen. Mr.
Richmond, Mr. Tempus-Julia! By all that’s holy, she floats a sinking
ship! Julia consoles me for the fairest, cruellest woman alive. A rough
sailor, Julia! at your feet.’

The captain fell commendably forward. Squire Gregory had already
dropped. Temple and I tried to meet, but did not accomplish it till next
morning at breakfast. A couple of footmen carried us each upstairs in
turn, as if they were removing furniture.

Out of this strange evening came my discovery of my father, and the
captain’s winning of a wife.



CHAPTER X. AN EXPEDITION

I wondered audibly where the Bench was when Temple and I sat together
alone at Squire Gregory’s breakfast-table next morning, very thirsty
for tea. He said it was a place in London, but did not add the sort
of place, only that I should soon be coming to London with him; and
I remarked, ‘Shall I?’ and smiled at him, as if in a fit of careless
affection. Then he talked runningly of the theatres and pantomimes and
London’s charms.

The fear I had of this Bench made me passingly conscious of Temple’s
delicacy in not repeating its name, though why I feared it there was
nothing to tell me. I must have dreamed of it just before waking, and
I burned for reasonable information concerning it. Temple respected my
father too much to speak out the extent of his knowledge on the subject,
so we drank our tea with the grandeur of London for our theme, where,
Temple assured me, you never had a headache after a carouse overnight:
a communication that led me to think the country a far less favourable
place of abode for gentlemen. We quitted the house without seeing our
host or the captain, and greatly admired by the footmen, the maids,
and the grooms for having drunk their masters under the table, which it
could not be doubted that we had done, as Temple modestly observed while
we sauntered off the grounds under the eyes of the establishment. We had
done it fairly, too, with none of those Jack the Giant-Killer tricks my
grandfather accused us of.

The squire would not, and he could not, believe our story until he heard
the confession from the mouth of the captain. After that he said we
were men and heroes, and he tipped us both, much to Janet Ilchester’s
advantage, for the squire was a royal giver, and Temple’s money had
already begun to take the same road as mine.

Temple, in fact, was falling desperately in love; for this reason he
shrank from quitting Riversley. I perceived it as clearly as a thing
seen through a windowpane. He was always meditating upon dogs, and what
might be the price of this dog or that, and whether lapdogs were good
travellers. The fashionable value of pugs filled him with a sort of
despair. ‘My goodness!’ he used an exclamation more suitable to women,
‘forty or fifty pounds you say one costs, Richie?’

I pretended to estimate the probable cost of one. ‘Yes, about that; but
I’ll buy you one, one day or other, Temple.’

The dear little fellow coloured hot; he was too much in earnest to laugh
at the absurdity of his being supposed to want a pug for himself, and
walked round me, throwing himself into attitudes with shrugs and loud
breathings. ‘I don’t... don’t think that I... I care for nothing but
Newfoundlands and mastiffs,’ said he. He went on shrugging and kicking
up his heels.

‘Girls like pugs,’ I remarked.

‘I fancy they do,’ said Temple, with a snort of indifference.

Then I suggested, ‘A pocket-knife for the hunting-field is a very good
thing.’

‘Do you think so?’ was Temple’s rejoinder, and I saw he was dreadfully
afraid of my speaking the person’s name for whom it would be such a very
good thing.

‘You can get one for thirty shillings. We’ll get one when we’re in
London. They’re just as useful for women as they are for us, you know.’

‘Why, of course they are, if they hunt,’ said Temple.

‘And we mustn’t lose time,’ I drew him to the point I had at heart, ‘for
hunting ‘ll soon be over. It ‘s February, mind!’

‘Oh, lots of time!’ Temple cried out, and on every occasion when I tried
to make him understand that I was bursting to visit London, he kept
evading me, simply because he hated saying good-bye to Janet Ilchester.
His dulness of apprehension in not perceiving that I could not commit
a breach of hospitality by begging him downright to start, struck me as
extraordinary. And I was so acute. I saw every single idea in his head,
every shift of, his mind, and how he half knew that he profited by my
shunning to say flatly I desired to set out upon the discovery of the
Bench. He took the benefit of my shamefacedness, for which I daily
punished his. I really felt that I was justified in giving my
irritability an airing by curious allusions to Janet; yet, though I made
him wince, it was impossible to touch his conscience. He admitted to
having repeatedly spoken of London’s charms, and ‘Oh, yes! you and I’ll
go back together, Richie,’ and saying that satisfied him: he doubled
our engagements with Janet that afternoon, and it was a riding party, a
dancing-party, and a drawing of a pond for carp, and we over to Janet,
and Janet over to us, until I grew so sick of her I was incapable of
summoning a spark of jealousy in order the better to torture Temple.

Now, he was a quick-witted boy. Well, I one day heard Janet address my
big dog, Ajax, in the style she usually employed to inform her hearers,
and especially the proprietor, that she coveted a thing: ‘Oh, you own
dear precious pet darling beauty! if I might only feed you every day of
my life I should be happy! I curtsey to him every time I see him. If I
were his master, the men should all off hats, and the women all curtsey,
to Emperor Ajax, my dog! my own! my great, dear irresistible love! Then
she nodded at me, ‘I would make them, though.’ And then at Temple, ‘You
see if I wouldn’t.’

Ajax was a source of pride to me. However, I heard Temple murmur, in a
tone totally unlike himself, ‘He would be a great protection to you’;
and I said to him, ‘You know, Temple, I shall be going to London
to-morrow or the next day, not later: I don’t know when I shall be back.
I wish you would dispose of the dog just as you like: get him a kind
master or mistress, that’s all.’

I sacrificed my dog to bring Temple to his senses. I thought it would
touch him to see how much I could sacrifice just to get an excuse for
begging him to start. He did not even thank me. Ajax soon wore one of
Janet’s collars, like two or three other of the Riversley dogs, and
I had the satisfaction of hearing Temple accept my grandfather’s
invitation for a further fortnight. And, meanwhile, I was the one who
was charged with going about looking lovelorn! I smothered my feelings
and my reflections on the wisdom of people.

At last my aunt Dorothy found the means of setting me at liberty on the
road to London. We had related to her how Captain Bulsted toasted
Julia Rippenger, and we had both declared in joke that we were sure the
captain wished to be introduced to her. My aunt reserved her ideas on
the subject, but by-and-by she proposed to us to ride over to Julia, and
engage her to come and stay at Riversley for some days. Kissing me, my
aunt said, ‘She was my Harry’s friend when he was an outcast.’

The words revived my affection for Julia. Strong in the sacred sense
of gratitude, I turned on Temple, reproaching him with selfish
forgetfulness of her good heart and pretty face. Without defending
himself, as he might have done, he entreated me to postpone our journey
for a day; he and Janet had some appointment. Here was given me a noble
cause and matter I need not shrink from speaking of. I lashed Temple in
my aunt’s presence with a rod of real eloquence that astonished her, and
him, and myself too; and as he had a sense of guilt not quite explicable
in his mind, he consented to bear what was in reality my burden; for
Julia had distinguished me and not him with all the signs of affection,
and of the two I had the more thoroughly forgotten her; I believe Temple
was first in toasting her at Squire Gregory’s table. There is nothing
like a pent-up secret of the heart for accumulating powers of speech; I
mean in youth. The mental distilling process sets in later, and then
you have irony instead of eloquence. From brooding on my father, and not
daring to mention his name lest I should hear evil of it, my
thoughts were a proud family, proud of their origin, proud of their
isolation,--and not to be able to divine them was for the world to
confess itself basely beneath their level. But, when they did pour out,
they were tremendous, as Temple found. This oratorical display of
mine gave me an ascendancy over him. He adored eloquence, not to say
grandiloquence: he was the son of a barrister. ‘Let ‘s go and see her
at once, Richie,’ he said of Julia. ‘I ‘m ready to be off as soon as you
like; I’m ready to do anything that will please you’; which was
untrue, but it was useless to tell him so. I sighed at my sad gift of
penetration, and tossed the fresh example of it into the treasury of
vanity.

‘Temple,’ said I, dissembling a little; ‘I tell you candidly: you won’t
please me by doing anything disagreeable to you. A dog pulled by the
collar is not much of a companion. I start for Julia to-morrow before
daylight. If you like your bed best, stop there; and mind you amuse
Janet for me duing my absence.’

‘I’m not going to let any one make comparisons between us,’ Temple
muttered.

He dropped dozens of similar remarks, and sometimes talked downright
flattery, I had so deeply impressed him.

We breakfasted by candle-light, and rode away on a frosty foggy morning,
keeping our groom fifty yards to the rear, a laughable sight, with both
his coat-pockets bulging, a couple of Riversley turnover pasties in one,
and a bottle of champagne in the other, for our lunch on the road. Now
and then, when near him, we galloped for the fun of seeing him nurse
the bottle-pocket. He was generally invisible. Temple did not think it
strange that we should be riding out in an unknown world with only a
little ring, half a stone’s-throw clear around us, and blots of
copse, and queer vanishing cottages, and hard grey meadows, fir-trees
wonderfully magnified, and larches and birches rigged like fairy ships,
all starting up to us as we passed, and melting instantly. One could
have fancied the fir-trees black torches. And here the shoulder of
a hill invited us to race up to the ridge: some way on we came to
crossroads, careless of our luck in hitting the right one: yonder hung a
village church in the air, and church-steeple piercing ever so high;
and out of the heart of the mist leaped a brook, and to hear it at one
moment, and then to have the sharp freezing silence in one’s ear,
was piercingly weird. It all tossed the mind in my head like hay on
a pitchfork. I forgot the existence of everything but what I loved
passionately,--and that had no shape, was like a wind.

Up on a knoll of firs in the middle of a heath, glowing rosy in the
frost, we dismounted to lunch, leaning against the warm saddles, Temple
and I, and Uberly, our groom, who reminded me of a certain tramp of my
acquaintance in his decided preference of beer to champagne; he drank,
though, and sparkled after his draught. No sooner were we on horseback
again--ere the flanks of the dear friendly brutes were in any way
cool--than Temple shouted enthusiastically, ‘Richie, we shall do it yet!
I’ve been funking, but now I’m sure we shall do it. Janet said, “What’s
the use of my coming over to dine at Riversley if Harry Richmond and you
don’t come home before ten or eleven o’clock?” I told her we’d do it
by dinner-time: Don’t you like Janet, Richie?--That is, if our
horses’ hic-haec-hocks didn’t get strained on this hard
nominative-plural-masculine of the article road. Don’t you fancy
yourself dining with the captain, Richie? Dative huic, says old Squire
Gregory. I like to see him at dinner, because he loves the smell of
his wine. Oh! it’s nothing to boast of, but we did drink them under
the table, it can’t be denied. Janet heard of it. Hulloa! you talk of a
hunting-knife. What do you say to a pair of skates? Here we are in for a
frost of six weeks. It strikes me, a pair of skates...’

This was the champagne in Temple. In me it did not bubble to speech,
and I soon drew him on at a pace that rendered conversation impossible.
Uberly shouted after us to spare the horses’ legs. We heard him twice
out of the deepening fog. I called to Temple that he was right, we
should do it. Temple hurrahed rather breathlessly. At the end of an hour
I pulled up at an inn, where I left the horses to be groomed and fed,
and walked away rapidly as if I knew the town, Temple following me with
perfect confidence, and, indeed, I had no intention to deceive him. We
entered a new station of a railway.

‘Oh!’ said Temple, ‘the rest of the way by rail.’

When the railway clerk asked me what place I wanted tickets for, London
sprang to my mouth promptly in a murmur, and taking the tickets I
replied to Temple,

‘The rest of the way by rail. Uberly’s sure to stop at that inn’; but
my heart beat as the carriages slid away with us; an affectionate
commiseration for Temple touched me when I heard him count on our being
back at Riversley in time to dress for dinner.

He laughed aloud at the idea of our plumping down on Rippenger’s school,
getting a holiday for the boys, tipping them, and then off with Julia,
exactly like two Gods of the Mythology, Apollo and Mercury.

‘I often used to think they had the jolliest lives that ever were
lived,’ he said, and trying to catch glimpses of the country, and
musing, and singing, he continued to feel like one of those blissful
Gods until wonder at the passage of time supervened. Amazement, when he
looked at my watch, struck him dumb. Ten minutes later we were in yellow
fog, then in brown. Temple stared at both windows and at me; he jumped
from his seat and fell on it, muttering, ‘No; nonsense! I say!’ but he
had accurately recognized London’s fog. I left him unanswered to
bring up all his senses, which the railway had outstripped, for the
contemplation of this fact, that we two were in the city of London.



CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT

It was London city, and the Bench was the kernel of it to me. I throbbed
with excitement, though I sat looking out of the windows into the
subterranean atmosphere quite still and firm. When you think long
undividedly of a single object it gathers light, and when you draw
near it in person the strange thing to your mind is the absence of that
light; but I, approaching it in this dense fog, seemed to myself to
be only thinking of it a little more warmly than usual, and instead of
fading it reversed the process, and became, from light, luminous. Not
being able, however, to imagine the Bench a happy place, I corrected the
excess of brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in
the middle of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping
over them in a sort of mournful family pride. Then, because I next
conceived it a foreign kind of place, different altogether from that
home growth of ours, the Tower of London, I topped it with a multitude
of domes of pumpkin or turban shape, resembling the Kremlin of Moscow,
which had once leapt up in the eye of Winter, glowing like a million
pine-torches, and flung shadows of stretching red horses on the black
smoke-drift. But what was the Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to
this Bench where my father languished! There was no comparing them for
tragic horror. And the Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench
was caught out of sight, hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon
breathed; it might as well be underground.

‘Oh! it’s London,’ Temple went on, correcting his incorrigible doubts
about it. He jumped on the platform; we had to call out not to lose one
another. ‘I say, Richie, this is London,’ he said, linking his arm in
mine: ‘you know by the size of the station; and besides, there’s the
fog. Oh! it’s London. We’ve overshot it, we’re positively in London.’

I could spare no sympathy for his feelings, and I did not respond to his
inquiring looks. Now that we were here I certainly wished myself away,
though I would not have retreated, and for awhile I was glad of the
discomforts besetting me; my step was hearty as I led on, meditating
upon asking some one the direction to the Bench presently. We had
to walk, and it was nothing but traversing on a slippery pavement
atmospheric circles of black brown and brown red, and sometimes a larger
circle of pale yellow; the colours of old bruised fruits, medlars,
melons, and the smell of them; nothing is more desolate. Neither of us
knew where we were, nor where we were going. We struggled through an
interminable succession of squalid streets, from the one lamp visible to
its neighbour in the darkness: you might have fancied yourself peering
at the head of an old saint on a smoky canvas; it was like the painting
of light rather than light. Figures rushed by; we saw no faces.

Temple spoke solemnly: ‘Our dinner-hour at home is half-past six.’ A
street-boy overheard him and chaffed him. Temple got the worst of it,
and it did him good, for he had the sweetest nature in the world. We
declined to be attended by link-boys; they would have hurt our sense
of independence. Possessed of a sovereign faith that, by dint of
resolution, I should ultimately penetrate to the great square enclosing
the Bench, I walked with the air of one who had the map of London in
his eye and could thread it blindfold. Temple was thereby deceived into
thinking that I must somehow have learnt the direction I meant to take,
and knew my way, though at the slightest indication of my halting and
glancing round his suspicions began to boil, and he was for asking some
one the name of the ground we stood on: he murmured, ‘Fellows get lost
in London.’ By this time he clearly understood that I had come to London
on purpose: he could not but be aware of the object of my coming, and I
was too proud, and he still too delicate, to allude to it.

The fog choked us. Perhaps it took away the sense of hunger by filling
us as if we had eaten a dinner of soot. We had no craving to eat until
long past the dinner-hour in Temple’s house, and then I would rather
have plunged into a bath and a bed than have been requested to sit at a
feast; Temple too, I fancy. We knew we were astray without speaking of
it. Temple said, ‘I wish we hadn’t drunk that champagne.’ It seemed to
me years since I had tasted the delicious crushing of the sweet bubbles
in my mouth. But I did not blame them; I was after my father: he, dear
little fellow, had no light ahead except his devotion to me: he must
have had a touch of conscious guilt regarding his recent behaviour,
enough to hold him from complaining formally. He complained of a London
without shops and lights, wondered how any one could like to come to it
in a fog, and so forth; and again regretted our having drunk champagne
in the morning; a sort of involuntary whimpering easily forgiven to him,
for I knew he had a gallant heart. I determined, as an act of signal
condescension, to accost the first person we met, male or female, for
Temple’s sake. Having come to this resolve, which was to be an open
confession that I had misled him, wounding to my pride, I hoped eagerly
for the hearing of a footfall. We were in a labyrinth of dark streets
where no one was astir. A wretched dog trotted up to us, followed at our
heels a short distance, and left us as if he smelt no luck about us; our
cajoleries were unavailing to keep that miserable companion.

‘Sinbad escaped from the pit by tracking a lynx,’ I happened to remark.
Temple would not hear of Sinbad.

‘Oh, come, we’re not Mussulmen,’ said he; ‘I declare, Richie, if I saw
a church open, I’d go in and sleep there. Were you thinking of tracking
the dog, then? Beer may be had somewhere. We shall have to find an
hotel. What can the time be?’

I owed it to him to tell him, so I climbed a lamppost and spelt out the
hour by my watch. When I descended we were three. A man had his hands on
Temple’s shoulders, examining his features.

‘Now speak,’ the man said, roughly.

I was interposing, but Temple cried, ‘All right, Richie, we are two to
one.’

The man groaned. I asked him what he wanted.

‘My son! I’ve lost my son,’ the man replied, and walked away; and he
would give no answer to our questions.

I caught hold of the lamp-post, overcome. I meant to tell Temple, in
response to the consoling touch of his hand, that I hoped the poor, man
would discover his son, but said instead, ‘I wish we could see the Bench
to-night.’ Temple exclaimed, ‘Ah!’ pretending by his tone of voice that
we had recently discussed our chance of it, and then he ventured to
inform me that he imagined he had heard of the place being shut up after
a certain hour of the night.

My heart felt released, and gushed with love for him. ‘Very well,
Temple,’ I said: ‘then we’ll wait till tomorrow, and strike out for some
hotel now.’

Off we went at a furious pace. Saddlebank’s goose was reverted to by
both of us with an exchange of assurances that we should meet a dish the
fellow to it before we slept.

‘As for life,’ said I, as soon as the sharp pace had fetched my
breathing to a regular measure, ‘adventures are what I call life.’

Temple assented. ‘They’re capital, if you only see the end of them.’

We talked of Ulysses and Penelope. Temple blamed him for leaving
Calypso. I thought Ulysses was right, otherwise we should have had no
slaying of the Suitors but Temple shyly urged that to have a Goddess
caring for you (and she was handsomer than Penelope, who must have been
an oldish woman) was something to make you feel as you do on a hunting
morning, when there are half-a-dozen riding-habits speckling the
field--a whole glorious day your own among them! This view appeared to
me very captivating, save for an obstruction in my mind, which was, that
Goddesses were always conceived by me as statues. They talked and they
moved, it was true, but the touch of them was marble; and they smiled
and frowned, but they had no variety they were never warm.

‘If I thought that!’ muttered Temple, puffing at the raw fog. He
admitted he had thought just the contrary, and that the cold had
suggested to him the absurdity of leaving a Goddess.

‘Look here, Temple,’ said I, ‘has it never struck you? I won’t say I’m
like him. It’s true I’ve always admired Ulysses; he could fight best,
talk best, and plough, and box, and how clever he was! Take him all
round, who wouldn’t rather have had him for a father than Achilles? And
there were just as many women in love with him.’

‘More,’ said Temple.

‘Well, then,’ I continued, thanking him in my heart, for it must have
cost him something to let Ulysses be set above Achilles, ‘Telemachus is
the one I mean. He was in search of his father. He found him at last.
Upon my honour, Temple, when I think of it, I ‘m ashamed to have waited
so long. I call that luxury I’ve lived in senseless. Yes! while I was
uncertain whether my father had enough to eat or not.’

‘I say! hush!’ Temple breathed, in pain at such allusions. ‘Richie, the
squire has finished his bottle by about now; bottle number two. He
won’t miss us till the morning, but Miss Beltham will. She’ll be at
your bedroom door three or four times in the night, I know. It’s getting
darker and darker, we must be in some dreadful part of London.’

The contrast he presented to my sensations between our pleasant home
and this foggy solitude gave me a pang of dismay. I diverged from my
favourite straight line, which seemed to pierce into the bowels of the
earth, sharp to the right. Soon or late after, I cannot tell, we were in
the midst of a thin stream of people, mostly composed of boys and young
women, going at double time, hooting and screaming with the delight of
loosened animals, not quite so agreeably; but animals never hunted on a
better scent. A dozen turnings in their company brought us in front of a
fire. There we saw two houses preyed on by the flames, just as if a lion
had his paws on a couple of human creatures, devouring them; we heard
his jaws, the cracking of bones, shrieks, and the voracious in-and-out
of his breath edged with anger. A girl by my side exclaimed, ‘It’s
not the Bench, after all! Would I have run to see a paltry two-story
washerwoman’s mangling-shed flare up, when six penn’orth of squibs and
shavings and a cracker make twice the fun!’

I turned to her, hardly able to speak. ‘Where ‘s the Bench, if you
please?’ She pointed. I looked on an immense high wall. The blunt flames
of the fire opposite threw a sombre glow on it.

The girl said, ‘And don’t you go hopping into debt, my young
cock-sparrow, or you’ll know one side o’ the turnkey better than t’
other.’ She had a friend with her who chid her for speaking so freely.

‘Is it too late to go in to-night?’ I asked.

She answered that it was, and that she and her friend were the persons
to show me the way in there. Her friend answered more sensibly: ‘Yes,
you can’t go in there before some time--in the morning.’

I learnt from her that the Bench was a debtors’ prison.

The saucy girl of the pair asked me for money. I handed her a
crown-piece.

‘Now won’t you give another big bit to my friend?’ said she.

I had no change, and the well-mannered girl bade me never mind, the
saucy one pressed for it, and for a treat. She was amusing in her talk
of the quantity of different fires she had seen; she had also seen
accidental-death corpses, but never a suicide in the act; and here
she regretted the failure of her experiences. This conversation of a
good-looking girl amazed me. Presently Temple cried, ‘A third house
caught, and no engines yet! Richie, there’s an old woman in her
night-dress; we can’t stand by.’

The saucy girl joked at the poor half-naked old woman. Temple stood
humping and agitating his shoulders like a cat before it springs. Both
the girls tried to stop us. The one I liked best seized my watch, and
said, ‘Leave this to me to take care of,’ and I had no time to wrestle
for it. I had a glimpse of her face that let me think she was not
fooling me, the watch-chain flew off my neck, Temple and I clove
through the crowd of gapers. We got into the heat, which was in a minute
scorching. Three men were under the window; they had sung out to the
old woman above to drop a blanket--she tossed them a water-jug. She was
saved by the blanket of a neighbour. Temple and I strained at one corner
of it to catch her.

She came down, the men said, like a singed turkey. The flames
illuminated her as she descended. There was a great deal of laughter
in the crowd, but I was shocked. Temple shared the painful impression
produced on me. I cannot express my relief when the old woman was
wrapped in the blanket which had broken her descent, and stood like
a blot instead of a figure. I handed a sovereign to the three men,
complimenting them on the humanity of their dispositions. They cheered
us, and the crowd echoed the cheer, and Temple and I made our way back
to the two girls: both of us lost our pocket-handkerchiefs, and Temple
a penknife as well. Then the engines arrived and soused the burning
houses. We were all in a crimson mist, boys smoking, girls laughing and
staring, men hallooing, hats and caps flying about, fights going on,
people throwing their furniture out of the windows. The great wall of
the Bench was awful in its reflection of the labouring flames--it rose
out of sight like the flame-tops till the columns of water brought them
down. I thought of my father, and of my watch. The two girls were not
visible. ‘A glorious life a fireman’s!’ said Temple.

The firemen were on the roofs of the houses, handsome as Greek heroes,
and it really did look as if they were engaged in slaying an enormous
dragon, that hissed and tongued at them, and writhed its tail, paddling
its broken big red wings in the pit of wreck and smoke, twisting and
darkening-something fine to conquer, I felt with Temple.

A mutual disgust at the inconvenience created by the appropriation
of our pocket-handkerchiefs by members of the crowd, induced us
to disentangle ourselves from it without confiding to any one our
perplexity for supper and a bed. We were now extremely thirsty. I had
visions of my majority bottles of Burgundy, lying under John Thresher’s
care at Dipwell, and would have abandoned them all for one on the spot.
After ranging about the outskirts of the crowd, seeking the two girls,
we walked away, not so melancholy but that a draught of porter would
have cheered us. Temple punned on the loss of my watch, and excused
himself for a joke neither of us had spirit to laugh at. Just as I was
saying, with a last glance at the fire, ‘Anyhow, it would have gone in
that crowd,’ the nice good girl ran up behind us, crying, ‘There!’ as
she put the watch-chain over my head.

‘There, Temple,’ said I, ‘didn’t I tell you so?’ and Temple kindly
supposed so.

The girl said, ‘I was afraid I’d missed you, little fellow, and you’d
take me for a thief, and thank God, I’m no thief yet. I rushed into the
crowd to meet you after you caught that old creature, and I could have
kissed you both, you’re so brave.’

‘We always go in for it together,’ said Temple.

I made an offer to the girl of a piece of gold. ‘Oh, I’m poor,’ she
cried, yet kept her hand off it like a bird alighting on ground, not on
prey. When I compelled her to feel the money tight, she sighed, ‘If I
wasn’t so poor! I don’t want your gold. Why are you out so late?’

We informed her of our arrival from the country, and wanderings in the
fog.

‘And you’ll say you’re not tired, I know,’ the girl remarked, and
laughed to hear how correctly she had judged of our temper. Our thirst
and hunger, however, filled her with concern, because of our not being
used to it as she was, and no place was open to supply our wants. Her
friend, the saucy one, accompanied by a man evidently a sailor, joined
us, and the three had a consultation away from Temple and me, at the end
of which the sailor, whose name was Joe, raised his leg dancingly, and
smacked it. We gave him our hands to shake, and understood, without
astonishment, that we were invited on, board his ship to partake of
refreshment. We should not have been astonished had he said on board his
balloon. Down through thick fog of a lighter colour, we made our way to
a narrow lane leading to the river-side, where two men stood thumping
their arms across their breasts, smoking pipes, and swearing. We entered
a boat and were rowed to a ship. I was not aware how frozen and befogged
my mind and senses had become until I had taken a desperate and long
gulp of smoking rum-and-water, and then the whole of our adventures
from morning to midnight, with the fir-trees in the country fog, and the
lamps in the London fog, and the man who had lost his son, the fire, the
Bench, the old woman with her fowl-like cry and limbs in the air, and
the row over the misty river, swam flashing before my eyes, and I cried
out to the two girls, who were drinking out of one glass with the sailor
Joe, my entertainer, ‘Well, I’m awake now!’ and slept straight off the
next instant.



CHAPTER XII. WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE

It seemed to me that I had but taken a turn from right to left, or
gone round a wheel, when I repeated the same words, and I heard Temple
somewhere near me mumble something like them. He drew a long breath, so
did I: we cleared our throats with a sort of whinny simultaneously. The
enjoyment of lying perfectly still, refreshed, incurious, unexcited, yet
having our minds animated, excursive, reaping all the incidents of our
lives at leisure, and making a dream of our latest experiences, kept us
tranquil and incommunicative. Occasionally we let fall a sigh fathoms
deep, then by-and-by began blowing a bit of a wanton laugh at the end
of it. I raised my foot and saw the boot on it, which accounted for an
uneasy sensation setting in through my frame.

I said softly, ‘What a pleasure it must be for horses to be groomed!’

‘Just what I was thinking!’ said Temple.

We started up on our elbows, and one or the other cried:

‘There’s a chart! These are bunks! Hark at the row overhead! We’re in a
ship! The ship’s moving! Is it foggy this morning? It’s time to get up!
I’ve slept in my clothes! Oh, for a dip! How I smell of smoke! What a
noise of a steamer! And the squire at Riversley! Fancy Uberly’s tale!’

Temple, with averted face, asked me whether I meant to return to
Riversley that day. I assured him I would, on my honour, if possible;
and of course he also would have to return there. ‘Why, you’ve an
appointment with Janet Ilchester,’ said I, ‘and we may find a pug; we’ll
buy the hunting-knife and the skates. And she shall know you saved an
old woman’s life.’

‘No, don’t talk about that,’ Temple entreated me, biting his lip.
‘Richie, we’re going fast through the water. It reminds me of breakfast.
I should guess the hour to be nine A.M.’

My watch was unable to assist us; the hands pointed to half-past four,
and were fixed. We ran up on deck. Looking over the stern of the vessel,
across a line of rippling eddying red gold, we saw the sun low upon
cushions of beautiful cloud; no trace of fog anywhere; blue sky
overhead, and a mild breeze blowing.

‘Sunrise,’ I said.

Temple answered, ‘Yes,’ most uncertainly.

We looked round. A steam-tug was towing our ship out toward banks of
red-reflecting cloud, and a smell of sea air.

‘Why, that’s the East there!’ cried Temple. We faced about to the sun,
and behold, he was actually sinking!

‘Nonsense!’ we exclaimed in a breath. From seaward to this stupefying
sunset we stood staring. The river stretched to broad lengths; gulls
were on the grey water, knots of seaweed, and the sea-foam curled in
advance of us.

‘By jingo!’ Temple spoke out, musing, ‘here’s a whole day struck out of
our existence.’

‘It can’t be!’ said I, for that any sensible being could be tricked of a
piece of his life in that manner I thought a preposterous notion.

But the sight of a lessening windmill in the West, shadows eastward,
the wide water, and the air now full salt, convinced me we two had
slept through an entire day, and were passing rapidly out of hail of our
native land.

‘We must get these fellows to put us on shore at once,’ said Temple:
‘we won’t stop to eat. There’s a town; a boat will row us there in
half-an-hour. Then we can wash, too. I’ve got an idea nothing’s clean
here. And confound these fellows for not having the civility to tell us
they were going to start!’

We were rather angry, a little amused, not in the least alarmed at
our position. A sailor, to whom we applied for an introduction to the
captain, said he was busy. Another gave us a similar reply, with a
monstrous grimace which was beyond our comprehension. The sailor Joe was
nowhere to be seen. None of the sailors appeared willing to listen to
us, though they stopped as they were running by to lend half an ear to
what we had to say. Some particular movement was going on in the ship.
Temple was the first to observe that the steamtug was casting us loose,
and cried he, ‘She’ll take us on board and back to London Bridge. Let’s
hail her.’ He sang out, ‘Whoop! ahoy!’ I meanwhile had caught sight of
Joe.

‘Well, young gentleman!’ he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well.
My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on board,
only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity. ‘You’re such a deuce
of a sleeper,’ he said. ‘You see, we had to be off early to make up for
forty hours lost by that there fog. I tried to wake you both; no good;
so I let you snore away. We took up our captain mid-way down the river,
and now you’re in his hands, and he’ll do what he likes with you, and
that ‘s a fact, and my opinion is you ‘ll see a foreign shore before
you’re in the arms of your family again.’

At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse,
transported into the bargain.

I insisted on seeing the captain. A big bright round moon was dancing
over the vessel’s bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping
into the distance, and the land receding, gave me--coming on my
wrath--suffocating emotions.

No difficulties were presented in my way. I was led up to a broad man in
a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his eyebrows
as if he were always making head against a gale. He nodded to my
respectful salute. ‘Cabin,’ he said, and turned his back to me.

I addressed him, ‘Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain. I must and
will go! I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked me
here. I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won’t be detained.’

Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a
school-slate for geography and Euclid’s propositions.

‘Cabin, cabin,’ the captain repeated.

I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face,
since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he occupied
the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and boxes, and
it would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when by another
right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at the blank
space between his shoulders.

Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I
bade him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it was,
and beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready for
hostilities. I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to the
cabin. ‘Captain Jasper Welsh,’ he was reiterating, as if sounding it to
discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain’s name, that
he had learnt from one of the seamen.

Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the
words came: ‘A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the vicinity
of the city of Bristol.’

This set Temple off laughing: ‘And so he bought a ship and had traps
laid down to catch young fellows for ransom.’

I was obliged to request Temple not to joke, but the next moment I had
launched Captain Jasper Welsh on a piratical exploit; Temple lifted the
veil from his history, revealing him amid the excesses of a cannibal
feast. I dragged him before a British jury; Temple hanged him in view
of an excited multitude. As he boasted that there was the end of Captain
Welsh, I broke the rope. But Temple spoiled my triumph by depriving him
of the use of his lower limbs after the fall, for he was a heavy man. I
could not contradict it, and therefore pitched all his ship’s crew upon
the gallows in a rescue. Temple allowed him to be carried off by his
faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain was never after
able to release his neck from the hangman’s slip knot. The consequence
was that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for concealment by
day, and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his wife said she was
a deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.

The talking of even such nonsense as this was a relief to us in our
impatience and helplessness, with the lights of land heaving far distant
to our fretful sight through the cabin windows.

When we had to talk reasonably we were not so successful. Captain Welsh
was one of those men who show you, whether you care to see them or not,
all the processes by which they arrive at an idea of you, upon which
they forthwith shape their course. Thus, when he came to us in the
cabin, he took the oil-lamp in his hand and examined our faces by its
light; he had no reply to our remonstrances and petitions: all he
said was, ‘Humph! well, I suppose you’re both gentlemen born’; and he
insisted on prosecuting his scrutiny without any reference to the tenour
of our observations.

We entreated him half imperiously to bring his ship to and put us
on shore in a boat. He bunched up his mouth, remarking, ‘Know their
grammar: habit o’ speaking to grooms, eh? humph.’ We offered to pay
largely. ‘Loose o’ their cash,’ was his comment, and so on; and he was
the more exasperating to us because he did not look an evil-minded man;
only he appeared to be cursed with an evil opinion of us. I tried to
remove it; I spoke forbearingly. Temple, imitating me, was sugar-sweet.
We exonerated the captain from blame, excused him for his error, named
the case a mistake on both sides. That long sleep of ours, we said,
was really something laughable; we laughed at the recollection of it, a
lamentable piece of merriment.

Our artfulness and patience becoming exhausted, for the captain had
vouchsafed us no direct answer, I said at last, ‘Captain Welsh, here we
are on board your ship will you tell us what you mean to do with us?’

He now said bluntly, ‘I will.’

‘You’ll behave like a man of honour,’ said I, and to that he cried
vehemently, ‘I will.’

‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘call out the boat, if you please; we’re anxious
to be home.’

‘So you shall!’ the captain shouted, ‘and per ship--my barque Priscilla;
and better men than you left, or I ‘m no Christian.’

Temple said briskly, ‘Thank you, captain.’

‘You may wait awhile with that, my lad,’ he answered; and, to our
astonishment, recommended us to go and clean our faces and prepare to
drink some tea at his table.

‘Thank you very much, captain, we’ll do that when we ‘re on shore,’ said
we.

‘You’ll have black figure-heads and empty gizzards, then, by that time,’
he remarked. We beheld him turning over the leaves of a Bible.

Now, this sight of the Bible gave me a sense of personal security, and
a notion of hypocrisy in his conduct as well; and perceiving that we had
conjectured falsely as to his meaning to cast us on shore per ship, his
barque Priscilla, I burst out in great heat, ‘What! we are prisoners?
You dare to detain us?’

Temple chimed in, in a similar strain. Fairly enraged, we flung at him
without anything of what I thought eloquence.

The captain ruminated up and down the columns of his Bible.

I was stung to feel that we were like two small terriers baiting a huge
mild bull. At last he said, ‘The story of the Prodigal Son.’

‘Oh!’ groaned Temple, at the mention of this worn-out old fellow, who
has gone in harness to tracts ever since he ate the fatted calf.

But the captain never heeded his interruption.

‘Young gentlemen, I’ve finished it while you ‘ve been barking at me.
If I ‘d had him early in life on board my vessel, I hope I’m not
presumptuous in saying--the Lord forgive me if I be so!--I’d have
stopped his downward career--ay, so!--with a trip in the right
direction. The Lord, young gentlemen, has not thrown you into my hands
for no purpose whatsoever. Thank him on your knees to-night, and thank
Joseph Double, my mate, when you rise, for he was the instrument of
saving you from bad company. If this was a vessel where you ‘d hear an
oath or smell the smell of liquor, I ‘d have let you run when there
was terra firma within stone’s throw. I came on board, I found you both
asleep, with those marks of dissipation round your eyes, and I swore--in
the Lord’s name, mind you--I’d help pluck you out of the pit while you
had none but one leg in. It’s said! It’s no use barking. I am not to
be roused. The devil in me is chained by the waist, and a twenty-pound
weight on his tongue. With your assistance I’ll do the same for the
devil in you. Since you’ve had plenty of sleep, I ‘ll trouble you to
commit to memory the whole story of the Prodigal Son ‘twixt now and
morrow’s sunrise. We ‘ll have our commentary on it after labour done.
Labour you will in my vessel, for your soul’s health. And let me advise
you not to talk; in your situation talking’s temptation to lying. You’ll
do me the obligation to feed at my table. And when I hand you back to
your parents, why, they’ll thank me, if you won’t. But it’s not thanks I
look for: it’s my bounden Christian duty I look to. I reckon a couple o’
stray lambs equal to one lost sheep.’

The captain uplifted his arm, ejaculating solemnly, ‘By!’ and faltered.
‘You were going to swear!’ said Temple, with savage disdain.

‘By the blessing of Omnipotence! I’ll save a pair o’ pups from turning
wolves. And I’m a weak mortal man, that ‘s too true.’

‘He was going to swear,’ Temple muttered to me.

I considered the detection of Captain Welsh’s hypocrisy unnecessary,
almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was
boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of eloquence
with which I was big. Soon after, I was trying to bribe the man with all
my money and my watch.

‘Who gave you that watch?’ said he.

‘Downright Church catechism!’ muttered Temple.

‘My grandfather,’ said I.

The captain’s head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something
indescribable.

‘My grandfather,’ I continued, ‘will pay you handsomely for any service
you do to me and my friend.’

‘Now, that’s not far off forgoing,’ said the captain, in a tone as much
as to say we were bad all over.

I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows. My desolation, my
humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together. Out it came--

‘Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent
it. Our relatives will be miserable about us. They--captain!--they don’t
know where we are. We haven’t even a change of clothes. Of course we
know we’re at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man. You shall be
paid or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we shall
be eternally grateful to you. Of course you mean kindly to us; we see
that--’

‘I thank the Lord for it!’ he interposed.

‘Only you really are under a delusion. It ‘s extraordinary. You can’t be
quite in your right senses about us; you must be--I don’t mean to speak
disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us....

‘Doddered, don’t they say in one of the shires?’ he remarked.

Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I
appealed to his manliness. Why should he take advantage of a couple of
boys? I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery
were not our friends suffering now. [‘Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean
in time to come!’ he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic
dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.

‘Is that Latin or Greek?’ he asked.

I would not reply to the cold-blooded question. He said the New
Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could
read it in the original.

‘Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?’ said
Temple, an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the
point than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so; however,
I took it up:--

‘How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on
board your vessel? Tell us that.’

He played thumb and knuckles on his table. Just when I was hoping that
good would come of the senseless tune, Temple cried,

‘Tell us what your exact intentions are, Captain Welsh. What do you mean
to do with us?’

‘Mean to take you the voyage out and the voyage home, Providence
willing,’ said the captain, and he rose.

We declined his offer of tea, though I fancy we could have gnawed at a
bone.

‘There’s no compulsion in that matter,’ he said. ‘You share my cabin
while you’re my guests, shipmates, and apprentices in the path of
living; my cabin and my substance, the same as if you were what the
North-countrymen call bairns o’ mine: I’ve none o’ my own. My wife was a
barren woman. I’ve none but my old mother at home. Have your sulks
out, lads; you’ll come round like the Priscilla on a tack, and discover
you’ve made way by it.’

We quitted his cabin, bowing stiffly.

Temple declared old Rippenger was better than this canting rascal.

The sea was around us, a distant yellow twinkle telling of land.

‘His wife a barren woman! what’s that to us!’ Temple went on, exploding
at intervals. ‘So was Sarah. His cabin and his substance! He talks more
like a preacher than a sailor. I should like to see him in a storm! He’s
no sailor at all. His men hate him. It wouldn’t be difficult to get up a
mutiny on board this ship. Richie, I understand the whole plot: he’s in
want of cabin-boys. The fellow has impressed us. We shall have to serve
till we touch land. Thank God, there’s a British consul everywhere; I
say that seriously. I love my country; may she always be powerful! My
life is always at her--Did you feel that pitch of the ship? Of all the
names ever given to a vessel, I do think Priscilla is without exception
the most utterly detestable. Oh! there again. No, it’ll be too bad,
Richie, if we ‘re beaten in this way.’

‘If YOU are beaten,’ said I, scarcely venturing to speak lest I should
cry or be sick.

We both felt that the vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect.
I set my head to think as hard as possible on Latin verses (my instinct
must have drawn me to them as to a species of intellectual biscuit
steeped in spirit, tough, and comforting, and fundamentally opposed to
existing circumstances, otherwise I cannot account for the attraction).
They helped me for a time; they kept off self-pity, and kept the
machinery of the mind at work. They lifted me, as it were, to an upper
floor removed from the treacherously sighing Priscilla. But I came down
quickly with a crash; no dexterous management of my mental resources
could save me from the hemp-like smell of the ship, nor would leaning
over the taffrail, nor lying curled under a tarpaulin. The sailors
heaped pilot-coats upon us. It was a bad ship, they said, to be sick on
board of, for no such thing as brandy was allowed in the old
Priscilla. Still I am sure I tasted some before I fell into a state
of semi-insensibility. As in a trance I heard Temple’s moans, and the
captain’s voice across the gusty wind, and the forlorn crunching of the
ship down great waves. The captain’s figure was sometimes stooping
over us, more great-coats were piled on us; sometimes the wind whistled
thinner than one fancies the shrieks of creatures dead of starvation and
restless, that spend their souls in a shriek as long as they can hold
it on, say nursery-maids; the ship made a truce with the waters and
grunted; we took two or three playful blows, we were drenched with
spray, uphill we laboured, we caught the moon in a net of rigging,
away we plunged; we mounted to plunge again and again. I reproached the
vessel in argument for some imaginary inconsistency. Memory was like a
heavy barrel on my breast, rolling with the sea.



CHAPTER XIII. WE CONDUCT SEVERAL LEARNED ARGUMENTS WITH THE CAPTAIN OF THE PRISCILLA

Captain Welsh soon conquered us. The latest meal we had eaten was on
the frosty common under the fir-trees. After a tremendous fast,
with sea-sickness supervening, the eggs and bacon, and pleasant
benevolent-smelling tea on the captain’s table were things not to be
resisted by two healthy boys who had previously stripped and faced
buckets of maddening ice-cold salt-water, dashed at us by a jolly
sailor. An open mind for new impressions came with the warmth of our
clothes. We ate, bearing within us the souls of injured innocents;
nevertheless, we were thankful, and, to the captain’s grace, a long one,
we bowed heads decently. It was a glorious breakfast, for which land and
sea had prepared us in about equal degrees: I confess, my feelings when
I jumped out of the cabin were almost those of one born afresh to life
and understanding. Temple and I took counsel. We agreed that sulking
would be ridiculous, unmanly, ungentlemanly. The captain had us fast,
as if we were under a lion’s paw; he was evidently a well-meaning man,
a fanatic deluded concerning our characters: the barque Priscilla was
bound for a German port, and should arrive there in a few days,--why not
run the voyage merrily since we were treated with kindness? Neither the
squire nor Temple’s father could complain of our conduct; we were simply
victims of an error that was assisting us to a knowledge of the world,
a youth’s proper ambition. ‘And we’re not going to be starved,’ said
Temple.

I smiled, thinking I perceived the reason why I had failed in my oration
over-night; so I determined that on no future occasion would I let pride
stand in the way of provender. Breakfast had completely transformed
us We held it due to ourselves that we should demand explanations from
Joseph Double, the mate, and then, after hearing him, furnish them with
a cordial alacrity to which we might have attached unlimited credence
had he not protested against our dreaming him to have supplied hot
rum-and-water on board, we wrote our names and addresses in the
captain’s log-book, and immediately asked permission to go to the
mast-head.

He laughed. Out of his cabin there was no smack of the preacher in
him. His men said he was a stout seaman, mad on the subject of grog and
girls. Why, it was on account of grog and girls that he was giving us
this dish of salt-water to purify us! Grog and girls! cried we. We vowed
upon our honour as gentlemen we had tasted grog for the first time in
our lives on board the Priscilla. How about the girls? they asked. We
informed them we knew none but girls who were ladies. Thereupon one
sailor nodded, one sent up a crow, one said the misfortune of the case
lay in all girls being such precious fine ladies; and one spoke in
dreadfully blank language, he accused us of treating the Priscilla as a
tavern for the entertainment of bad company, stating that he had helped
to row me and my associates from the shore to the ship.

‘Poor Mr. Double!’ says he; ‘there was only one way for him to jump
you two young gentlemen out o’ that snapdragon bowl you was in--or
quashmire, call it; so he ‘ticed you on board wi’ the bait you was
swallowing, which was making the devil serve the Lord’s turn. And I’ll
remember that night, for I yielded to swearing, and drank too!’ The
other sailors roared with laughter.

I tipped them, not to appear offended by their suspicions. We thought
them all hypocrites, and were as much in error as if we had thought them
all honest.

Things went fairly well with the exception of the lessons in Scripture.
Our work was mere playing at sailoring, helping furl sails, haul ropes,
study charts, carry messages, and such like. Temple made his voice
shrewdly emphatic to explain to the captain that we liked the work,
but that such lessons as these out of Scripture were what the eeriest
youngsters were crammed with.

‘Such lessons as these, maybe, don’t have the meaning on land they get
to have on the high seas,’ replied the captain: ‘and those youngsters
you talk of were not called in to throw a light on passages: for I
may teach you ship’s business aboard my barque, but we’re all children
inside the Book.’

He groaned heartily to hear that our learning lay in the direction of
Pagan Gods and Goddesses, and heathen historians and poets; adding, it
was not new to him, and perhaps that was why the world was as it was.
Nor did he wonder, he said, at our running from studies of those filthy
writings loose upon London; it was as natural as dunghill steam. Temple
pretended he was forced by the captain’s undue severity to defend Venus;
he said, I thought rather wittily, ‘Sailors ought to have a respect for
her, for she was born in the middle of the sea, and she steered straight
for land, so she must have had a pretty good idea of navigation.’

But the captain answered none the less keenly, ‘She had her idea of
navigating, as the devil of mischief always has, in the direction where
there’s most to corrupt; and, my lad, she teaches the navigation that
leads to the bottom beneath us.’

He might be right, still our mien was evil in reciting the lessons from
Scripture; and though Captain Welsh had intelligence we could not draw
into it the how and the why of the indignity we experienced. We had
rather he had been a savage captain, to have braced our spirits
to sturdy resistance, instead of a mild, good-humoured man of kind
intentions, who lent us his linen to wear, fed us at his table, and
taxed our most gentlemanly feelings to find excuses for him. Our way of
revenging ourselves becomingly was to laud the heroes of antiquity, as
if they had possession of our souls and touched the fountain of worship.
Whenever Captain Welsh exclaimed, ‘Well done,’ or the equivalent, ‘That
‘s an idea,’ we referred him to Plutarch for our great exemplar. It was
Alcibiades gracefully consuming his black broth that won the captain’s
thanks for theological acuteness, or the young Telemachus suiting his
temper to the dolphin’s moods, since he must somehow get on shore on
the dolphin’s back. Captain Welsh could not perceive in Temple the
personifier of Alcibiades, nor Telemachus in me; but he was aware of an
obstinate obstruction behind our compliance. This he called the devil
coiled like a snake in its winter sleep. He hurled texts at it openly,
or slyly dropped a particularly heavy one, in the hope of surprising it
with a death-blow. We beheld him poring over his Bible for texts that
should be sovereign medicines for us, deadly for the devil within us.
Consequently, we were on the defensive: bits of Cicero, bits of
Seneca, soundly and nobly moral, did service on behalf of Paganism;
we remembered them certainly almost as if an imp had brought them
from afar. Nor had we any desire to be in opposition to the cause he
supported. What we were opposed to was the dogmatic arrogance of a
just but ignorant man, who had his one specific for everything, and saw
mortal sickness in all other remedies or recreations. Temple said to
him,

‘If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to tell me Greek and Latin authors
are bad for me, I should listen to his remarks, because he ‘s a scholar:
he knows the languages and knows what they contain.’

Captain Welsh replied,

‘If the Archbishop o’ Canterbury sailed the sea, and lived in Foul
Alley, Waterside, when on shore, and so felt what it is to toss on top
of the waves o’ perdition, he’d understand the value of a big, clean,
well-manned, well-provisioned ship, instead o’ your galliots wi’ gaudy
sails, your barges that can’t rise to a sea, your yachts that run to
port like mother’s pets at first pipe o’ the storm, your trim-built
wherries.’

‘So you’d have only one sort of vessel afloat!’ said I. ‘There’s the
difference of a man who’s a scholar.’

‘I’d have,’ said the captain, ‘every lad like you, my lad, trained in
the big ship, and he wouldn’t capsize, and be found betrayed by his
light timbers as I found you. Serve your apprenticeship in the Lord’s
three-decker; then to command what you may.’

‘No, no, Captain Welsh,’ says Temple: ‘you must grind at Latin and Greek
when you ‘re a chick, or you won’t ever master the rudiments. Upon my
honour, I declare it ‘s the truth, you must. If you’d like to try, and
are of a mind for a go at Greek, we’ll do our best to help you through
the aorists. It looks harder than Latin, but after a start it ‘s easier.
Only, I’m afraid your three-decker’s apprenticeship ‘ll stand in your
way.’

‘Greek ‘s to be done for me; I can pay clever gentlemen for doing Greek
for me,’ said the captain. ‘The knowledge and the love of virtue I must
do for myself; and not to be wrecked, I must do it early.’

‘Well, that’s neither learning nor human nature,’ said I.

‘It’s the knowledge o’ the right rules for human nature, my lad.’

‘Would you kidnap youngsters to serve in your ship, captain?’

‘I’d bless the wind that blew them there, foul or not, my lad.’

‘And there they’d stick when you had them, captain?’

‘I’d think it was the Lord’s will they should stick there awhile, my
lad--yes.’

‘And what of their parents?’

‘Youngsters out like gossamers on a wind, their parents are where they
sow themselves, my lad.’

‘I call that hard on the real parents, Captain Welsh,’ said Temple.

‘It’s harder on Providence when parents breed that kind o’ light
creature, my lad.’

We were all getting excited, talking our best, such as it was;
the captain leaning over his side of the table, clasping his hands
unintentionally preacher-like; we on our side supporting our chins
on our fists, quick to be at him. Temple was brilliant; he wanted to
convert the captain, and avowed it.

‘For,’ said he, ‘you’re not like one of those tract-fellows. You’re a
man we can respect, a good seaman, master of your ship, and hearty, and
no mewing sanctimoniousness, and we can see and excuse your mistake as
to us two; but now, there’s my father at home--he’s a good man, but he
‘s a man of the world, and reads his classics and his Bible. He’s none
the worse for it, I assure you.’

‘Where was his son the night of the fog?’ said the captain.

‘Well, he happened to be out in it.’

‘Where’d he be now but for one o’ my men?’

‘Who can answer that, Captain Welsh?’

‘I can, my lad-stewing in an ante-room of hell-gates, I verily believe.’

Temple sighed at the captain’s infatuation, and said, ‘I’ll tell you
of a fellow at our school named Drew; he was old Rippenger’s best
theological scholar--always got the prize for theology. Well, he was a
confirmed sneak. I’ve taken him into a corner and described the torments
of dying to him, and his look was disgusting--he broke out in a clammy
sweat. “Don’t, don’t!” he’d cry. “You’re just the fellow to suffer
intensely,” I told him. And what was his idea of escaping it? Why, by
learning the whole of Deuteronomy and the Acts of the Apostles by heart!
His idea of Judgement Day was old Rippenger’s half-yearly examination.
These are facts, you know, Captain Welsh.’

I testified to them briefly.

The captain said a curious thing: ‘I’ll make an appointment with you in
leviathan’s jaws the night of a storm, my lad.’

‘With pleasure,’ said Temple.

‘The Lord send it!’ exclaimed the captain.

His head was bent forward, and he was gazing up into his eyebrows.

Before we knew that anything was coming, he was out on a narrative of
a scholar of one of the Universities. Our ears were indifferent to the
young man’s career from the heights of fortune to delirium tremens down
the cataract of brandy, until the captain spoke of a dark night on the
Pool of the Thames; and here his voice struggled, and we tried hard to
catch the thread of the tale. Two men and a girl were in the boat.
The men fought, the girl shrieked, the boat was upset, the three were
drowned.

All this came so suddenly that nothing but the captain’s heavy thump of
his fist on the table kept us from laughing.

He was quite unable to relate the tale, and we had to gather it from
his exclamations. One of the men was mate of a vessel lying in the Pool,
having only cast anchor that evening; the girl was his sweetheart;
the other man had once been a fine young University gentleman, and had
become an outfitter’s drunken agent. The brave sailor had nourished him
often when on shore, and he, with the fluent tongue which his college
had trimmed for him, had led the girl to sin during her lover’s absence.
Howsoever, they put off together to welcome him on his arrival,
never suspecting that their secret had been whispered to Robert Welsh
beforehand. Howsoever, Robert gave them hearty greeting, and down to the
cabin they went, and there sat drinking up to midnight.

‘Three lost souls!’ said the captain.

‘See how they run,’ Temple sang, half audibly, and flushed hot, ashamed
of himself.

‘‘Twas I had to bear the news to his mother,’ the captain pursued; ‘and
it was a task, my lads, for I was then little more than your age, and
the glass was Robert’s only fault, and he was my only brother.’

I offered my hand to the captain. He grasped it powerfully. ‘That crew
in a boat, and wouldn’t you know the devil’d be coxswain?’ he called
loudly, and buried his face.

‘No,’ he said, looking up at us, ‘I pray for no storm, but, by the
Lord’s mercy, for a way to your hearts through fire or water. And now on
deck, my lads, while your beds are made up. Three blind things we verily
are.’

Captain Welsh showed he was sharp of hearing. His allusion to the
humming of the tune of the mice gave Temple a fit of remorse, and he
apologized.

‘Ay,’ said the captain, ‘it is so; own it: frivolity’s the fruit of that
training that’s all for the flesh. But dip you into some o’ my books on
my shelves here, and learn to see living man half skeleton, like life
and shadow, and never to living man need you pray forgiveness, my lad.’

By sheer force of character he gained the command of our respect. Though
we agreed on deck that he had bungled his story, it impressed us; we
felt less able to cope with him, and less willing to encounter a storm.

‘We shall have one, of course,’ Temple said, affecting resignation, with
a glance aloft.

I was superstitiously of the same opinion, and praised the vessel.

‘Oh, Priscilla’s the very name of a ship that founders with all hands
and sends a bottle on shore,’ said Temple.

‘There isn’t a bottle on board,’ said I; and this piece of nonsense
helped us to sleep off our gloom.



CHAPTER XIV. I MEET OLD FRIENDS

Notwithstanding the prognostications it pleased us to indulge, we had a
tolerably smooth voyage. On a clear cold Sunday morning we were sailing
between a foreign river’s banks, and Temple and I were alternately
reading a chapter out of the Bible to the assembled ship’s crew, in
advance of the captain’s short exhortation. We had ceased to look at
ourselves inwardly, and we hardly thought it strange. But our hearts
beat for a view of the great merchant city, which was called a free
city, and therefore, Temple suggested, must bear certain portions of
resemblance to old England; so we made up our minds to like it.

‘A wonderful place for beer cellars,’ a sailor observed to us slyly, and
hitched himself up from the breech to the scalp.

At all events, it was a place where we could buy linen.

For that purpose, Captain Welsh handed us over to the care of his
trusted mate Mr. Joseph Double, and we were soon in the streets of the
city, desirous of purchasing half their contents. My supply of money was
not enough for what I deemed necessary purchases. Temple had split his
clothes, mine were tarred; we were appearing at a disadvantage, and we
intended to dine at a good hotel and subsequently go to a theatre. Yet I
had no wish to part with my watch. Mr. Double said it might be arranged.
It was pawned at a shop for a sum equivalent in our money to about
twelve pounds, and Temple obliged me by taking charge of the ticket.
Thus we were enabled to dress suitably and dine pleasantly, and, as Mr.
Double remarked, no one could rob me of my gold watch now. We visited a
couple of beer-cellars to taste the drink of the people, and discovered
three of our men engaged in a similar undertaking. I proposed that it
should be done at my expense. They praised their captain, but asked us,
as gentlemen and scholars, whether it was reasonable to object to
liquor because your brother was carried out on a high tide? Mr. Double
commended them to moderation. Their reply was to estimate an immoderate
amount of liquor as due to them, with profound composure.

‘Those rascals,’ Mr. Double informed us, ‘are not in the captain’s
confidence they’re tidy seamen, though, and they submit to the captain’s
laws on board and have their liberty ashore.’

We inquired what the difference was between their privileges and his.

‘Why,’ said he, ‘if they’re so much as accused of a disobedient act, off
they ‘re scurried, and lose fair wages and a kind captain. And let any
man Jack of ‘em accuse me, and he bounds a india-rubber ball against
a wall and gets it; all he meant to give he gets. Once you fix the
confidence of your superior, you’re waterproof.’

We held our peace, but we could have spoken.

Mr. Double had no moral hostility toward theatres. Supposing he did not
relish the performance, he could enjoy a spell in the open air, he said,
and this he speedily decided to do. Had we not been bound in honour
to remain for him to fetch us, we also should have retired from a
representation of which we understood only the word ja. It was tiresome
to be perpetually waiting for the return of this word. We felt somewhat
as dogs must feel when human speech is addressed to them. Accordingly,
we professed, without concealment, to despise the whole performance. I
reminded Temple of a saying of the Emperor Charles V. as to a knowledge
of languages.

‘Hem!’ he went critically; ‘it’s all very well for a German to talk
in that way, but you can’t be five times an Englishman if you’re a
foreigner.’

We heard English laughter near us. Presently an English gentleman
accosted us.

‘Mr. Villiers, I believe?’ He bowed at me.

‘My name is Richmond.’

He bowed again, with excuses, talked of the Play, and telegraphed to
a lady sitting in a box fronting us. I saw that she wrote on a slip of
paper; she beckoned; the gentleman quitted us, and soon after placed a
twisted note in my hand. It ran:

‘Miss Goodwin (whose Christian name is Clara) wishes very much to know
how it has fared with Mr. Harry Richmond since he left Venice.’

I pushed past a number of discontented knees, trying, on my way to her
box, to recollect her vividly, but I could barely recollect her at all,
until I had sat beside her five minutes. Colonel Goodwin was asleep in
a corner of the box. Awakened by the sound of his native tongue, he
recognized me immediately.

‘On your way to your father?’ he said, as he shook my hand.

I thought it amazing he should guess that in Germany.

‘Do you know where he is, sir?’ I asked.

‘We saw him,’ replied the colonel; ‘when was it, Clara? A week or ten
days ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Goodwin; ‘we will talk of that by-and-by.’ And she
overflowed with comments on my personal appearance, and plied me with
questions, but would answer none of mine.

I fetched Temple into the box to introduce him. We were introduced in
turn to Captain Malet, the gentleman who had accosted me below.

‘You understand German, then?’ said Miss Goodwin.

She stared at hearing that we knew only the word ja, for it made our
presence in Germany unaccountable.

‘The most dangerous word of all,’ said Colonel Goodwin, and begged us
always to repeat after it the negative nein for an antidote.

‘You have both seen my father?’ I whispered to Miss Goodwin; ‘both? We
have been separated. Do tell me everything. Don’t look at the stage-they
speak such nonsense. How did you remember me? How happy I am to have
met you! Oh! I haven’t forgotten the gondolas and the striped posts,
and stali and the other word; but soon after we were separated, and I
haven’t seen him since.’

She touched her father’s arm.

‘At once, if you like,’ said he, jumping up erect.

‘In Germany was it?’ I persisted.

She nodded gravely and leaned softly on my arm while we marched out
of the theatre to her hotel--I in such a state of happiness underlying
bewilderment and strong expectation that I should have cried out loud
had not pride in my partner restrained me. At her tea-table I narrated
the whole of my adventure backwards to the time of our parting in
Venice, hurrying it over as quick as I could, with the breathless
termination, ‘And now?’

They had an incomprehensible reluctance to perform their part of the
implied compact. Miss Goodwin looked at Captain Malet. He took his
leave. Then she said, ‘How glad I am you have dropped that odious name
of Roy! Papa and I have talked of you frequently--latterly very often. I
meant to write to you, Harry Richmond. I should have done it the moment
we returned to England.’

‘You must know,’ said the colonel, ‘that I am an amateur inspector of
fortresses, and my poor Clara has to trudge the Continent with me to
pick up the latest inventions in artillery and other matters, for which
I get no thanks at head-quarters--but it ‘s one way of serving one’s
country when the steel lies rusting. We are now for home by way of
Paris. I hope that you and your friend will give us your company. I will
see this Captain Welsh of yours before we start. Clara, you decided on
dragging me to the theatre to-night with your usual admirable instinct.’

I reminded Miss Goodwin of my father being in Germany.

‘Yes, he is at one of the Courts, a long distance from here,’ she said,
rapidly. ‘And you came by accident in a merchant-ship! You are one of
those who are marked for extraordinary adventures. Confess: you would
have set eyes on me, and not known me. It’s a miracle that I should meet
my little friend Harry--little no longer my friend all the same, are you
not?’

I hoped so ardently.

She with great urgency added, ‘Then come with us. Prove that you put
faith in our friendship.’

In desperation I exclaimed, ‘But I must, I must hear of my father.’

She turned to consult the colonel’s face.

‘Certainly,’ he said, and eulogized a loving son. ‘Clara will talk to
you. I’m for bed. What was the name of the play we saw this evening? Oh!
Struensee, to be sure. We missed the scaffold.’

He wished us good-night on an appointment of the hour for breakfast, and
ordered beds for us in the hotel.

Miss Goodwin commenced: ‘But really I have nothing to tell you, or
very little. You know, Papa has introductions everywhere; we are like
Continental people, and speak a variety of languages, and I am almost a
foreigner, we are so much abroad; but I do think English boys should be
educated at home: I hope you’ll go to an English college.’

Noticing my painful look, ‘We saw him at the Court of the Prince of
Eppenwelzen,’ she said, as if her brows ached. ‘He is very kindly
treated there; he was there some weeks ago. The place lies out in the
Hanover direction, far from here. He told us that you were with your
grandfather, and I must see Riversley Grange, and the truth is you must
take me there. I suspect you have your peace to make; perhaps I shall
help you, and be a true Peribanou. We go over Amsterdam, the Hague,
Brussels, and you shall see the battlefield, Paris, straight to London.
Yes, you are fickle; you have not once called me Peribanou.’

Her voluble rattling succeeded in fencing off my questions before I
could exactly shape them, as I staggered from blind to blind idea, now
thinking of the sombre red Bench, and now of the German prince’s Court.

‘Won’t you tell me any more to-night?’ I said, when she paused.

‘Indeed, I have not any more to tell,’ she assured me.

It was clear to me that she had joined the mysterious league against
my father. I began to have a choking in the throat. I thanked her and
wished her good-night while I was still capable of smiling.

At my next interview with Colonel Goodwin he spoke promptly on the
subject of my wanderings. I was of an age, he said, to know my own
interests. No doubt filial affection was excellent in its way, but in
fact it was highly questionable whether my father was still at the
Court of this German prince; my father had stated that he meant to visit
England to obtain an interview with his son, and I might miss him by
a harum-scarum chase over Germany. And besides, was I not offending
my grandfather and my aunt, to whom I owed so much? He appealed to my
warmest feelings on their behalf. This was just the moment, he said,
when there was a turning-point in my fortunes. He could assure me most
earnestly that I should do no good by knocking at this prince’s doors,
and have nothing but bitterness if I did in the end discover my father.
‘Surely you understand the advantages of being bred a gentleman?’ he
wound up. ‘Under your grandfather’s care you have a career before you,
a fine fortune in prospect, everything a young man can wish for. And I
must tell you candidly, you run great risk of missing all these things
by hunting your father to earth. Give yourself a little time: reflect on
it.’

‘I have,’ I cried. ‘I have come out to find him, and I must.’

The colonel renewed his arguments and persuasions until he was worn out.
I thanked him continually for his kindness. Clara Goodwin besought me
in a surprising manner to accompany her to England, called herself
Peribanou, and with that name conjured up my father to my eyes in his
breathing form. She said, as her father had done, that I was called on
now to decide upon my future: she had a presentiment that evil would
come to me of my unchecked, headstrong will, which she dignified by
terming it a true but reckless affection: she believed she had been
thrown in my path to prove herself a serviceable friend, a Peribanou of
twenty-six who would not expect me to marry her when she had earned my
gratitude.

They set Temple on me, and that was very funny. To hear him with his
‘I say, Richie, come, perhaps it’s as well to know where a thing should
stop; your father knows you’re at Riversley, and he’ll be after you
when convenient; and just fancy the squire!’ was laughable. He had some
anxiety to be home again, or at least at Riversley. I offered him to
Miss Goodwin.

She reproached me and coaxed me; she was exceedingly sweet. ‘Well,’ she
said, in an odd, resigned fashion, ‘rest a day with us; will you refuse
me that?’

I consented; she knew not with what fretfulness. We went out to gaze at
the shops and edifices, and I bought two light bags for slinging over
the shoulder, two nightshirts, toothbrushes, and pocket-combs, and a
large map of Germany. By dint of vehement entreaties I led her to point
to the territory of the Prince of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld. ‘His income is
rather less than that of your grandfather, friend Harry,’ she remarked.
I doated on the spot until I could have dropped my finger on it
blindfold.

Two or three pitched battles brought us to a friendly arrangement.
The colonel exacted my promise that if I saw my father at Sarkeld in
Eppenwelzen I would not stay with him longer than seven days: and that
if he was not there I would journey home forthwith. When I had yielded
the promise frankly on my honour, he introduced me to a banker of the
city, who agreed to furnish me money to carry me on to England in case I
should require it. A diligence engaged to deliver me within a few miles
of Sarkeld. I wrote a letter to my aunt Dorothy, telling her facts, and
one to the squire, beginning, ‘We were caught on our arrival in London
by the thickest fog ever remembered,’ as if it had been settled on my
departure from Riversley that Temple and I were bound for London. Miss
Goodwin was my post-bag. She said when we had dined, about two hours
before the starting of the diligence, ‘Don’t you think you ought to go
and wish that captain of the vessel you sailed in goodbye?’ I fell
into her plot so far as to walk down to the quays on the river-side and
reconnoitre the ship. But there I saw my prison. I kissed my hand to
Captain Welsh’s mainmast rather ironically, though not without regard
for him. Miss Goodwin lifted her eyelids at our reappearance. As she
made no confession of her treason I did not accuse her, and perhaps it
was owing to a movement of her conscience that at our parting she drew
me to her near enough for a kiss to come of itself.

Four-and-twenty German words of essential service to a traveller in
Germany constituted our knowledge of the language, and these were
on paper transcribed by Miss Goodwin’s own hand. In the gloom of the
diligence, packed between Germans of a size that not even Tacitus had
prepared me for, smoked over from all sides, it was a fascinating study.
Temple and I exchanged the paper half-hourly while the light lasted.
When that had fled, nothing was left us to combat the sensation that
we were in the depths of a manure-bed, for the windows were closed,
the tobacco-smoke thickened, the hides of animals wrapping our immense
companions reeked; fire occasionally glowed in their pipe-bowls; they
were silent, and gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate
forces of nature. I had most fantastic ideas,--that I had taken root and
ripened, and must expect my head to drop off at any instant: that I was
deep down, wedged in the solid mass of the earth. But I need not repeat
them: they were accurately translated in imagination from my physical
miseries. The dim revival of light, when I had well-nigh ceased to hope
for it, showed us all like malefactors imperfectly hanged, or drowned
wretches in a cabin under water. I had one Colossus bulging over my
shoulder! Temple was blotted out. His face, emerging from beneath a
block of curly bearskin, was like that of one frozen in wonderment.
Outside there was a melting snow on the higher hills; the clouds over
them grew steel-blue. We were going through a valley in a fir-forest.



CHAPTER XV. WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST

Bowls of hot coffee and milk, with white rolls of bread to dip in them,
refreshed us at a forest inn. For some minutes after the meal Temple and
I talked like interchangeing puffs of steam, but soon subsided to our
staring fit. The pipes were lit again. What we heard sounded like a
language of the rocks and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of
gluttons feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the hinge in
every mouth. Dumpy children, bulky men, compressed old women with
baked faces, and comical squat dogs, kept the villages partly alive. We
observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite a dog, and he and
the dog took alternate bites off a platter-shaped cake, big enough to
require both his hands to hold it. Whether the dog ever snapped more
than his share was matter of speculation to us. It was an education for
him in good manners, and when we were sitting at dinner we wished our
companions had enjoyed it. They fed with their heads in their plates,
splashed and clattered jaws, without paying us any hospitable attention
whatever, so that we had the dish of Lazarus. They were perfectly kind,
notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of my great map of Germany to
lie spread over their knees in the diligence, whilst Temple and I pored
along the lines of the rivers. One would thrust his square-nailed finger
to the name of a city and pronounce it; one gave us lessons in the
expression of the vowels, with the softening of three of them, which
seemed like a regulation drill movement for taking an egg into the
mouth, and showing repentance of the act. ‘Sarkeld,’ we exclaimed
mutually, and they made a galloping motion of their hands, pointing
beyond the hills. Sarkeld was to the right, Sarkeld to the left, as the
road wound on. Sarkeld was straight in front of us when the conductor,
according to directions he had received, requested us to alight and push
through this endless fir-forest up a hilly branch road, and away his
hand galloped beyond it, coming to a deep place, and then to grapes,
then to a tip-toe station, and under it lay Sarkeld. The pantomime was
not bad. We waved our hand to the diligence, and set out cheerfully,
with our bags at our backs, entering a gorge in the fir-covered hills
before sunset, after starting the proposition--Does the sun himself look
foreign in a foreign country?

‘Yes, he does,’ said Temple; and so I thought, but denied it, for by
the sun’s favour I hoped to see my father that night, and hail Apollo
joyfully in the morning; a hope that grew with exercise of my limbs.
Beautiful cascades of dark bright water leaped down the gorge; we chased
an invisible animal. Suddenly one of us exclaimed, ‘We ‘re in a German
forest’; and we remembered grim tales of these forests, their awful
castles, barons, knights, ladies, long-bearded dwarfs, gnomes and thin
people. I commenced a legend off-hand.

‘No, no,’ said Temple, as if curdling; ‘let’s call this place the mouth
of Hades. Greek things don’t make you feel funny.’

I laughed louder than was necessary, and remarked that I never had cared
so much for Greek as on board Captain Welsh’s vessel.

‘It’s because he was all on the opposite tack I went on quoting,’ said
Temple. ‘I used to read with my father in the holidays, and your Rev.
Simon has kept you up to the mark; so it was all fair. It ‘s not on our
consciences that we crammed the captain about our knowledge.’

‘No. I’m glad of it,’ said I.

Temple pursued, ‘Whatever happens to a fellow, he can meet anything so
long as he can say--I ‘ve behaved like a man of honour. And those German
tales--they only upset you. You don’t see the reason of the thing. Why
is a man to be haunted half his life? Well, suppose he did commit a
murder. But if he didn’t, can’t he walk through an old castle without
meeting ghosts? or a forest?’

The dusky scenery of a strange land was influencing Temple. It affected
me so, I made the worst of it for a cure.

‘Fancy those pines saying, “There go two more,” Temple. Well; and fancy
this--a little earth-dwarf as broad as I’m long and high as my shoulder.
One day he met the loveliest girl in the whole country, and she promised
to marry him in twenty years’ time, in return for a sack of jewels worth
all Germany and half England. You should have seen her dragging it home.
People thought it full of charcoal. She married the man she loved, and
the twenty years passed over, and at the stroke of the hour when she
first met the dwarf, thousands of bells began ringing through the
forest, and her husband cries out, “What is the meaning of it?” and
they rode up to a garland of fresh flowers that dropped on her head,
and right into a gold ring that closed on her finger, and--look, Temple,
look!’

‘Where?’ asked the dear little fellow, looking in all earnest, from
which the gloom of the place may be imagined, for, by suddenly mixing it
with my absurd story, I discomposed his air of sovereign indifference as
much as one does the surface of a lake by casting a stone in it.

We rounded the rocky corner of the gorge at a slightly accelerated pace
in dead silence. It opened out to restorative daylight, and we breathed
better and chaffed one another, and, beholding a house with pendent gold
grapes, applauded the diligence conductor’s expressive pantomime.
The opportunity was offered for a draught of wine, but we held water
preferable, so we toasted the Priscilla out of the palms of our hands in
draughts of water from a rill that had the sound of aspen-leaves, such
as I used to listen to in the Riversley meadows, pleasantly familiar.

Several commanding elevations were in sight, some wooded, some bare. We
chose the nearest, to observe the sunset, and concurred in thinking
it unlike English sunsets, though not so very unlike the sunset we had
taken for sunrise on board the Priscilla. A tumbled, dark and light
green country of swelling forest-land and slopes of meadow ran to the
West, and the West from flaming yellow burned down to smoky crimson
across it. Temple bade--me ‘catch the disc--that was English enough.’ A
glance at the sun’s disc confirmed the truth of his observation. Gazing
on the outline of the orb, one might have fancied oneself in England.
Yet the moment it had sunk under the hill this feeling of ours vanished
with it. The coloured clouds drew me ages away from the recollection of
home.

A tower on a distant hill, white among pines, led us to suppose that
Sarkeld must lie somewhere beneath it. We therefore descended straight
toward the tower, instead of returning to the road, and struck
confidently into a rugged path. Recent events had given me the assurance
that in my search for my father I was subject to a special governing
direction. I had aimed at the Bench--missed it--been shipped across sea
and precipitated into the arms of friends who had seen him and could
tell me I was on his actual track, only blindly, and no longer blindly
now.

‘Follow the path,’ I said, when Temple wanted to have a consultation.

‘So we did in the London fog!’ said he, with some gloom.

But my retort: ‘Hasn’t it brought us here?’ was a silencer.

Dark night came on. Every height stood for a ruin in our eyes, every dip
an abyss. It grew bewilderingly dark, but the path did not forsake
us, and we expected, at half-hour intervals, to perceive the lights
of Sarkeld, soon to be thundering at one of the inns for admission and
supper. I could hear Temple rehearsing his German vocabulary, ‘Brod,
butter, wasser, fleisch, bett,’ as we stumbled along. Then it fell to
‘Brod, wasser, bett,’ and then, ‘Bett’ by itself, his confession of
fatigue. Our path had frequently the nature of a waterway, and was very
fatiguing, more agreeable to mount than descend, for in mounting the
knees and shins bore the brunt of it, and these sufferers are not such
important servants of the footfarer as toes and ankles in danger of
tripping and being turned.

I was walking on leveller ground, my head bent and eyes half-shut, when
a flash of light in a brook at my feet caused me to look aloft. The
tower we had marked after sunset was close above us, shining in a light
of torches. We adopted the sensible explanation of this mysterious
sight, but were rather in the grip of the superstitious absurd one,
until we discerned a number of reddened men.

‘Robbers!’ exclaimed one of us. Our common thought was, ‘No; robbers
would never meet on a height in that manner’; and we were emboldened to
mount and request their help.

Fronting the tower, which was of white marble, a high tent had been
pitched on a green platform semicircled by pines. Torches were stuck in
clefts of the trees, or in the fork of the branches, or held by boys and
men, and there were clearly men at work beneath the tent at a busy rate.
We could hear the paviour’s breath escape from them. Outside the ring of
torchbearers and others was a long cart with a dozen horses harnessed
to it. All the men appeared occupied too much for chatter and laughter.
What could be underneath the tent? Seeing a boy occasionally lift one
of the flapping corners, we took licence from his example to appease our
curiosity. It was the statue of a bronze horse rearing spiritedly. The
workmen were engaged fixing its pedestal in the earth.

Our curiosity being satisfied, we held debate upon our immediate
prospects. The difficulty of making sure of a bed when you are once
detached from your home, was the philosophical reflection we arrived at,
for nothing practical presented itself. To arm ourselves we pulled out
Miss Goodwin’s paper. ‘Gasthof is the word!’ cried Temple. ‘Gasthof,
zimmer, bett; that means inn, hot supper, and bed. We’ll ask.’ We asked
several of the men. Those in motion shot a stare at us; the torchbearers
pointed at the tent and at an unseen height, muttering ‘Morgen.’
Referring to Miss Goodwin’s paper we discovered this to signify the
unintelligible word morning, which was no answer at all; but the men,
apparently deeming our conduct suspicious, gave us to understand by
rather menacing gestures that we were not wanted there, so we passed
into the dusk of the trees, angry at their incivility. Had it been
Summer we should have dropped and slept. The night air of a sharp season
obliged us to keep active, yet we were not willing to get far away from
the torches. But after a time they were hidden; then we saw one moving
ahead. The holder of it proved to be a workman of the gang, and between
us and him the strangest parley ensued. He repeated the word morgen, and
we insisted on zimmer and bett.

‘He takes us for twin Caspar Hausers,’ sighed Temple.

‘Nein,’ said the man, and, perhaps enlightened by hearing a foreign
tongue, beckoned for us to step at his heels.

His lodging was a woodman’s hut. He offered us bread to eat, milk to
drink, and straw to lie on: we desired nothing more, and were happy,
though the bread was black, the milk sour, the straw mouldy.

Our breakfast was like a continuation of supper, but two little girls
of our host, whose heads were cased in tight-fitting dirty linen caps,
munched the black bread and drank the sour milk so thankfully, while
fixing solemn eyes of wonder upon us, that to assure them we were the
same sort of creature as themselves we pretended to relish the stuff.
Rather to our amazement we did relish it. ‘Mutter!’ I said to them. They
pointed to the room overhead. Temple laid his cheek on his hand. One of
the little girls laid hers on the table. I said ‘Doctor?’ They nodded
and answered ‘Princess,’ which seemed perfectly good English, and sent
our conjectures as to the state of their mother’s health astray. I shut
a silver English coin in one of their fat little hands.

We now, with the name Sarkeld, craved of their father a direction to
that place. At the door of his but he waved his hand carelessly South
for Sarkeld, and vigorously West where the tower stood, then swept both
hands up to the tower, bellowed a fire of cannon, waved his hat, and
stamped and cheered. Temple, glancing the way of the tower, performed
on a trumpet of his joined fists to show we understood that prodigious
attractions were presented by the tower; we said ja and ja, and
nevertheless turned into the Sarkeld path.

Some minutes later the sound of hoofs led us to imagine he had
despatched a messenger after us. A little lady on a pony, attended by
a tawny-faced great square-shouldered groom on a tall horse, rode past,
drew up on one side, and awaited our coming. She was dressed in a grey
riding-habit and a warm winter-jacket of gleaming grey fur, a soft white
boa loose round her neck, crossed at her waist, white gauntlets, and a
pretty black felt hat with flowing rim and plume. There she passed as
under review. It was a curious scene: the iron-faced great-sized groom
on his bony black charger dead still: his mistress, a girl of about
eleven or twelve or thirteen, with an arm bowed at her side, whip
and reins in one hand, and slips of golden brown hair straying on her
flushed cheek; rocks and trees, high silver firs rising behind her, and
a slender water that fell from the rocks running at her pony’s feet.
Half-a-dozen yards were between the charger’s head and the pony’s
flanks. She waited for us to march by, without attempting to conceal
that we were the objects of her inspection, and we in good easy swing of
the feet gave her a look as we lifted our hats. That look was to me like
a net thrown into moonlighted water: it brought nothing back but broken
lights of a miraculous beauty.

Burning to catch an excuse for another look over my shoulder, I heard
her voice:

‘Young English gentlemen!’

We turned sharp round.

It was she without a doubt who had addressed us: she spurred her pony
to meet us, stopped him, and said with the sweetest painful attempt at
accuracy in pronouncing a foreign tongue:

‘I sthink you go a wrong way?’

Our hats flew off again, and bareheaded, I seized the reply before
Temple could speak.

‘Is not this, may I ask you, the way to Sarkeld?’

She gathered up her knowledge of English deliberately.

‘Yes, one goes to Sarkeld by sthis way here, but to-day goes everybody
up to our Bella Vista, and I entreat you do not miss it, for it is
some-s-thing to write to your home of.’

‘Up at the tower, then? Oh, we were there last night, and saw the bronze
horse, mademoiselle.’

‘Yes, I know. I called on my poor sick woman in a but where you
fell asleep, sirs. Her little ones are my lambs; she has been of
our household; she is good; and they said, two young, strange, small
gentlemen have gone for Sarkeld; and I supposed, sthey cannot know all
go to our Bella Vista to-day.’

‘You knew at once we were English, mademoiselle?’

‘Yes, I could read it off your backs, and truly too your English eyes
are quite open at a glance. It is of you both I speak. If I but make my
words plain! My “th” I cannot always. And to understand, your English
is indeed heavy speech! not so in books. I have my English governess.
We read English tales, English poetry--and sthat is your excellence. And
so, will you not come, sirs, up when a way is to be shown to you? It is
my question.’

Temple thanked her for the kindness of the offer.

I was hesitating, half conscious of surprise that I should ever be
hesitating in doubt of taking the direction toward my father. Hearing
Temple’s boldness I thanked her also, and accepted. Then she said,
bowing:

‘I beg you will cover your heads.’

We passed the huge groom bolt upright on his towering horse; he raised
two fingers to the level of his eyebrows in the form of a salute.

Temple murmured: ‘I shouldn’t mind entering the German Army,’ just as
after our interview with Captain Bulsted he had wished to enter the
British Navy.

This was no more than a sign that he was highly pleased. For my part
delight fluttered the words in my mouth, so that I had to repeat half I
uttered to the attentive ears of our gracious new friend and guide:

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘one does sthink one knows almost all before experiment.
I am ashamed, yet I will talk, for is it not so? experiment is a school.
And you, if you please, will speak slow. For I say of you English
gentlemen, silk you spin from your lips; it is not as a language of an
alphabet; it is pleasant to hear when one would lull, but Italian can do
that, and do it more--am I right? soft?

‘Bella Vista, lovely view,’ said I.

‘Lovely view,’ she repeated.

She ran on in the most musical tongue, to my thinking, ever heard:

‘And see my little pensioners’ poor cottage, who are out up to Lovely
View. Miles round go the people to it. Good, and I will tell you
strangers: sthe Prince von Eppenwelzen had his great ancestor, and his
sister Markgrafin von Rippau said, “Erect a statue of him, for he was a
great warrior.” He could not, or he would not, we know not. So she said,
“I will,” she said, “I will do it in seven days.” She does constantly
amuse him, everybody at de Court. Immense excitement! For suppose it!--a
statue of a warrior on horseback, in perfect likeness, chapeau tricorne,
perruque, all of bronze, and his marshal’s baton. Eh bien, well, a
bronze horse is come at a gallop from Berlin; sthat we know. By fortune
a most exalted sculptor in Berlin has him ready,--and many horses pulled
him to here, to Lovely View, by post-haste; sthat we know. But we are in
extremity of puzzlement. For where is the statue to ride him? where--am
I plain to you, sirs?--is sthe Marshal Furst von Eppenwelzen, our great
ancestor? Yet the Markgrafin says, “It is right, wait!” She nods, she
smiles. Our Court is all at de lake-palace odder side sthe tower, and
it is bets of gems, of feathers, of lace, not to be numbered! The
Markgrafin says--sthere to-day you see him, Albrecht Wohlgemuth Furst
von Eppenwelzen! But no sculptor can have cast him in bronze--not copied
him and cast him in a time of seven days! And we say sthis:--Has
she given a secret order to a sculptor--you understand me, sirs,
commission--where, how, has he sthe likeness copied? Or did he come to
our speisesaal of our lake-palace disguised? Oh! but to see, to copy, to
model, to cast in bronze, to travel betwixt Berlin and Sarkeld in a time
of seven days? No! so-oh! we guess, we guess, we are in exhaustion. And
to-day is like an eagle we have sent an arrow to shoot and know not if
he will come down. For shall we see our ancestor on horseback? It will
be a not-scribable joy! Or not? So we guess, we are worried. At near
eleven o’clock a cannon fires, sthe tent is lifted, and we see; but I am
impatient wid my breaths for de gun to go.’

I said it would be a fine sight.

‘For strangers, yes; you should be of de palace to know what a fine
sight! sthe finest! And you are for Sarkeld? You have friends in
Sarkeld?’

‘My father is in Sarkeld, mademoiselle. I am told he is at the palace.’

‘Indeed; and he is English, your fater?’

‘Yes. I have not seen him for years; I have come to find him.’

‘Indeed; it is for love of him, your fater, sir, you come, and not speak
German?’

I signified that it was so.

‘She stroked her pony’s neck musing.

‘Because, of love is not much in de family in England, it is said,’ she
remarked very shyly, and in recovering her self-possession asked the
name of my father.

‘His name, mademoiselle, is Mr. Richmond.’

‘Mr. Richmond?’

‘Mr. Richmond Roy.’

She sprang in her saddle.

‘You are son to Mr. Richmond Roy? Oh! it is wonderful.’

‘Mademoiselle, then you have seen him lately?’

‘Yes, yes! I have seen him. I have heard of his beautiful child, his
son; and you it is?’

She studied my countenance a moment.

‘Tell me, is he well?’ mademoiselle, is he quite well?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she answered, and broke into smiles of merriment, and then
seemed to bite her underlip. ‘He is our fun-maker. He must always be
well. I owe to him some of my English. You are his son? you were for
Sarkeld? You will see him up at our Bella Vista. Quick, let us run.’

She put her pony to a canter up the brown path between the fir-trees,
crying that she should take our breath; but we were tight runners, and
I, though my heart beat wildly, was full of fire to reach the tower
on the height; so when she slackened her pace, finding us close on her
pony’s hoofs, she laughed and called us brave boys. Temple’s being
no more than my friend, who had made the expedition with me out of
friendship, surprised her. Not that she would not have expected it to be
done by Germans; further she was unable to explain her astonishment.

At a turning of the ascent she pointed her whip at the dark knots and
lines of the multitude mounting by various paths to behold the ceremony
of unveiling the monument.

I besought her to waste no time.

‘You must, if you please, attend my pleasure, if I guide you,’ she said,
tossing her chin.

‘I thank you, I can’t tell you how much, mademoiselle,’ said I.

She answered: ‘You were kind to my two pet lambs, sir.’

So we moved forward.



CHAPTER XVI. THE STATUE ON THE PROMONTORY

The little lady was soon bowing to respectful salutations from crowds
of rustics and others on a broad carriage-way circling level with the
height. I could not help thinking how doubly foreign I was to all the
world here--I who was about to set eyes on my lost living father, while
these people were tip-toe to gaze on a statue. But as my father might
also be taking an interest in the statue, I got myself round to a
moderate sentiment of curiosity and a partial share of the general
excitement. Temple and mademoiselle did most of the conversation, which
related to glimpses of scenery, pine, oak, beech-wood, and lake-water,
until we gained the plateau where the tower stood, when the giant groom
trotted to the front, and worked a clear way for us through a mass of
travelling sight-seers, and she leaned to me, talking quite inaudibly
amid the laughter and chatting. A band of wind instruments burst out.
‘This is glorious!’ I conceived Temple to cry like an open-mouthed mute.
I found it inspiriting.

The rush of pride and pleasure produced by the music was irresistible.
We marched past the tower, all of us, I am sure, with splendid feelings.
A stone’s throw beyond it was the lofty tent; over it drooped a flag,
and flags were on poles round a wide ring of rope guarded by foresters
and gendarmes, mounted and afoot. The band, dressed in green, with black
plumes to their hats, played in the middle of the ring. Outside were
carriages, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback, full of animation;
rustics, foresters, town and village people, men, women, and children,
pressed against the ropes. It was a day of rays of sunshine, now from
off one edge, now from another of large slow clouds, so that at times we
and the tower were in a blaze; next the lake-palace was illuminated, or
the long grey lake and the woods of pine and of bare brown twigs making
bays in it.

Several hands beckoned on our coming in sight of the carriages. ‘There
he is, then!’ I thought; and it was like swallowing my heart in one
solid lump. Mademoiselle had free space to trot ahead of us. We saw a
tall-sitting lady, attired in sables, raise a finger to her, and nip her
chin. Away the little lady flew to a second carriage, and on again,
as one may when alive with an inquiry. I observed to Temple, ‘I wonder
whether she says in her German, “It is my question”; do you remember?’
There was no weight whatever in what I said or thought.

She rode back, exclaiming, ‘Nowhere. He is nowhere, and nobody knows.
He will arrive. But he is not yet. Now,’ she bent coaxingly down to
me, ‘can you not a few words of German? Only a smallest sum! It is
the Markgrafin, my good aunt, would speak wid you, and she can no
English-only she is eager to behold you, and come! You will know, for
my sake, some scrap of German--ja? You will--nicht wahr? Or French? Make
your glom-pudding of it, will you?’

I made a shocking plum-pudding of it. Temple was no happier.

The margravine, a fine vigorous lady with a lively mouth and livelier
eyes of a restless grey that rarely dwelt on you when she spoke, and
constantly started off on a new idea, did me the honour to examine me,
much as if I had offered myself for service in her corps of grenadiers,
and might do in time, but was decreed to be temporarily wanting in manly
proportions.

She smiled a form of excuse of my bungling half-English horrid French,
talked over me and at me, forgot me, and recollected me, all within
a minute, and fished poor Temple for intelligible replies to
incomprehensible language in the same manner, then threw her head back
to gather the pair of us in her sight, then eyed me alone.

‘C’est peut-etre le fils de son petit papa, et c’est tout dire.’

Such was her summary comment.

But not satisfied with that, she leaned out of the carriage, and, making
an extraordinary grimace appear the mother in labour of the difficult
words, said, ‘Doos yo’ laff?’

There was no helping it: I laughed like a madman, giving one outburst
and a dead stop.

Far from looking displeased, she nodded. I was again put to the dreadful
test.

‘Can yo’ mak’ laff?’

It spurred my wits. I had no speech to ‘mak’ laff’ with. At the very
instant of my dilemma I chanced to see a soberly-clad old townsman
hustled between two helpless women of the crowd, his pipe in his mouth,
and his hat, wig, and handkerchief sliding over his face, showing his
bald crown, and he not daring to cry out, for fear his pipe should be
trodden under foot.

‘He can, your Highness.’

Her quick eyes caught the absurd scene. She turned to one of her ladies
and touched her forehead. Her hand was reached out to me; Temple she
patted on the shoulder.

‘He can--ja: du auch.’

A grand gentleman rode up. They whispered, gazed at the tent, and
appeared to speak vehemently. All the men’s faces were foreign: none
of them had the slightest resemblance to my father’s. I fancied I
might detect him disguised. I stared vainly. Temple, to judge by the
expression of his features, was thinking. Yes, thought I, we might as
well be at home at old Riversley, that distant spot! We ‘re as out of
place here as frogs in the desert!

Riding to and fro, and chattering, and commotion, of which the
margravine was the centre, went on, and the band played beautiful
waltzes. The workmen in and out of the tent were full of their business,
like seamen under a storm.

‘Fraulein Sibley,’ the margravine called.

I hoped it might be an English name. So it proved to be; and the delight
of hearing English spoken, and, what was more, having English ears to
speak to, was blissful as the leap to daylight out of a nightmare.

‘I have the honour to be your countrywoman,’ said a lady, English all
over to our struggling senses.

We became immediately attached to her as a pair of shipwrecked boats
lacking provender of every sort are taken in tow by a well-stored
vessel. She knew my father, knew him intimately. I related all I had to
tell, and we learnt that we had made acquaintance with her pupil, the
Princess Ottilia Wilhelmina Frederika Hedwig, only child of the Prince
of Eppenwelzen.

‘Your father will certainly be here; he is generally the margravine’s
right hand, and it’s wonderful the margravine can do without him so
long,’ said Miss Sibley, and conversed with the margravine; after which
she informed me that she had been graciously directed to assure me my
father would be on the field when the cannon sounded.

‘Perhaps you know nothing of Court life?’ she resumed. ‘We have very
curious performances in Sarkeld, and we owe it to the margravine that we
are frequently enlivened. You see the tall gentleman who is riding away
from her. I mean the one with the black hussar jacket and thick brown
moustache. That is the prince. Do you not think him handsome? He is very
kind--rather capricious; but that is a way with princes. Indeed, I have
no reason to complain. He has lost his wife, the Princess Frederika,
and depends upon his sister the margravine for amusement. He has had it
since she discovered your papa.’

‘Is the gun never going off?’ I groaned.

‘If they would only conduct their ceremonies without their guns!’
exclaimed Miss Sibley. ‘The origin of the present ceremony is this: the
margravine wished to have a statue erected to an ancestor, a renowned
soldier--and I would infinitely prefer talking of England. But never
mind. Oh, you won’t understand what you gaze at. Well, the prince did
not care to expend the money. Instead of urging that as the ground of
his refusal, he declared there were no sculptors to do justice to
Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth, and one could not rely on their effecting
a likeness. We have him in the dining-hall; he was strikingly handsome.
Afterward he pretended--I’m speaking now of the existing Prince
Ernest--that it would be ages before the statue was completed. One day
the margravine induced him to agree to pay the sum stipulated for by
the sculptor, on condition of the statue being completed for public
inspection within eight days of the hour of their agreement. The whole
Court was witness to it. They arranged for the statue, horse and man, to
be exhibited for a quarter of an hour. Of course, the margravine did not
signify it would be a perfectly finished work. We are kept at a great
distance, that we may not scrutinize it too closely. They unveil it to
show she has been as good as her word, and then cover it up to fix the
rider to the horse,--a screw is employed, I imagine. For one thing we
know about it, we know that the horse and the horseman travelled hither
separately. In all probability, the margravine gave the order for the
statue last autumn in Berlin. Now look at the prince. He has his eye on
you. Look down. Now he has forgotten you. He is impatient to behold the
statue. Our chief fear is that the statue will not maintain its balance.
Fortunately, we have plenty of guards to keep the people from pushing
against it. If all turns out well, I shall really say the margravine has
done wonders. She does not look anxious; but then she is not one ever to
show it. The prince does. Every other minute he is glancing at the tent
and at his watch. Can you guess my idea? Your father’s absence leads
me to think-oh! only a passing glimmer of an idea--the statue has not
arrived, and he is bringing it on. Otherwise, he would be sure to be
here. The margravine beckons me.’

‘Don’t go!’ we cried simultaneously.

The Princess Ottilia supplied her place.

‘I have sent to our stables for two little pretty Hungarian horses for
you two to ride,’ she said. ‘No, I have not yet seen him. He is asked
for, and de Markgrafin knows not at all. He bades in our lake; he has
been seen since. The man is exciteable; but he is so sensible. Oh, no.
And he is full of laughter. We shall soon see him. Would he not ever be
cautious of himself for a son like you?’

Her compliment raised a blush on me.

The patience of the people was creditable to their phlegm. The smoke
of pipes curling over the numberless heads was the most stirring thing
about them.

Temple observed to me,

‘We’ll give the old statue a British cheer, won’t we, Richie?’

‘After coming all the way from England!’ said I, in dejection.

‘No, no, Richie; you’re sure of him now. He ‘s somewhere directing
affairs, I suspect. I say, do let us show them we can ring out the right
tune upon occasion. By jingo! there goes a fellow with a match.’

We saw the cannonier march up to the margravine’s carriage for orders.
She summoned the prince to her side. Ladies in a dozen carriages were
standing up, handkerchief in hand, and the gentlemen got their horses’
heads on a line. Temple counted nearly sixty persons of quality
stationed there. The workmen were trooping out of the tent.

Miss Sibley ran to us, saying,--

‘The gun-horror has been commanded. Now then: the prince can scarcely
contain himself. The gunner is ready near his gun; he has his frightful
match lifted. See, the manager-superintendent is receiving the
margravine’s last injunctions. How firm women’s nerves are! Now the
margravine insists on the prince’s reading the exact time by her watch.
Everybody is doing it. Let us see. By my watch it is all but fifteen
minutes to eleven, A.M. Dearest,’ she addressed the little princess;
‘would you not like to hold my hand until the gun is fired?’

‘Dearest,’ replied the princess, whether in childish earnest or irony I
could not divine, ‘if I would hold a hand it would be a gentleman’s.’

All eyes were on the Prince of Eppenwelzen, as he gazed toward the
covered statue. With imposing deliberation his hand rose to his hat. We
saw the hat raised. The cannon was fired and roared; the band struck up
a pompous slow march: and the tent-veil broke apart and rolled off. It
was like the dawn flying and sunrise mounting.

I confess I forgot all thought of my father for awhile; the shouts of
the people, the braying of the brass instruments, the ladies cheering
sweetly, the gentlemen giving short, hearty expressions of applause,
intoxicated me. And the statue was superb-horse and rider in new bronze
polished by sunlight.

‘It is life-like! it is really noble! it is a true Prince!’ exclaimed
Miss Sibley. She translated several exclamations of the ladies and
gentlemen in German: they were entirely to the same effect. The horse
gave us a gleam of his neck as he pawed a forefoot, just reined in. We
knew him; he was a gallant horse; but it was the figure of the Prince
Albrecht that was so fine. I had always laughed at sculptured figures
on horseback. This one overawed me. The Marshal was acknowledging the
salute of his army after a famous victory over the infidel Turks. He
sat upright, almost imperceptibly but effectively bending his head in
harmony with the curve of his horse’s neck, and his baton swept the air
low in proud submission to the honours cast on him by his acclaiming
soldiery. His three-cornered lace hat, curled wig, heavy-trimmed
surcoat, and high boots, reminded me of Prince Eugene. No Prince
Eugene--nay, nor Marlborough, had such a martial figure, such an
animated high old warrior’s visage. The bronze features reeked of
battle.

Temple and I felt humiliated (without cause, I granted) at the success
of a work of Art that struck us as a new military triumph of these
Germans, and it was impossible not to admire it. The little Princess
Ottilia clapped hands by fits. What words she addressed to me I know
not. I dealt out my stock of German--‘Ja, ja--to her English. We were
drawn by her to congratulate the margravine, whose hand was then being
kissed by the prince: he did it most courteously and affectionately.
Other gentlemen, counts and barons, bowed over her hand. Ladies,
according to their rank and privileges, saluted her on the cheek or in
some graceful fashion. When our turn arrived, Miss Sibley translated for
us, and as we were at concert pitch we did not acquit ourselves badly.
Temple’s remark was, that he wished she and all her family had been
English. Nothing was left for me to say but that the margravine almost
made us wish we had been German.

Smiling cordially, the margravine spoke, Miss Sibley translated:

‘Her Royal Highness asks you if you have seen your father?’

I shook my head.

The Princess Ottilia translated, ‘Her Highness, my good aunt, would
know, would you know him, did you see him?’

‘Yes, anywhere,’ I cried.

The margravine pushed me back with a gesture.

‘Yes, your Highness, on my honour; anywhere on earth!’

She declined to hear the translation.

Her insulting disbelief in my ability to recognize the father I had come
so far to embrace would have vexed me but for the wretched thought that
I was losing him again. We threaded the carriages; gazed at the horsemen
in a way to pierce the hair on their faces. The little princess came on
us hurriedly.

‘Here, see, are the horses. I will you to mount. Are they not pretty
animals?’ She whispered, ‘I believe your fater have been hurt in his
mind by something. It is only perhaps. Now mount, for de Markgrafin says
you are our good guests.’

We mounted simply to show that we could mount, for we would rather
have been on foot, and drew up close to the right of the margravine’s
carriage.

‘Hush! a poet is reading his ode,’ said the princess. ‘It is Count
Fretzel von Wolfenstein.’

This ode was dreadful to us, and all the Court people pretended they
liked it. When he waved his right hand toward the statue there was a
shout from the rustic set; when he bowed to the margravine, the ladies
and gentlemen murmured agreeably and smiled. We were convinced of its
being downright hypocrisy, rustic stupidity, Court flattery. We would
have argued our case, too. I proposed a gallop; Temple said,

‘No, we’ll give the old statue our cheer as soon as this awful fellow
has done. I don’t care much for poetry, but don’t let me ever have to
stand and hear German poetry again for the remainder of my life.’

We could not imagine why they should have poetry read out to them
instead of their fine band playing, but supposed it was for the
satisfaction of the margravine, with whom I grew particularly annoyed
on hearing Miss Sibley say she conceived her Highness to mean that my
father was actually on the ground, and that we neither of us, father
and son, knew one another. I swore on my honour, on my life, he was
not present; and the melancholy in my heart taking the form of extreme
irritation, I spoke passionately. I rose in my stirrups, ready to shout,
‘Father! here’s Harry Richmond come to see you. Where are you!’ I did
utter something--a syllable or two: ‘Make haste!’ I think the words
were. They sprang from my inmost bosom, addressed without forethought
to that drawling mouthing poet. The margravine’s face met mine like
a challenge. She had her lips tight in a mere lip-smile, and her eyes
gleamed with provocation.

‘Her Highness,’ Miss Sibley translated, ‘asks whether you are prepared
to bet that your father is not on the ground?’

‘Beg her to wait two minutes, and I’ll be prepared to bet any sum,’ said
I.

Temple took one half the circle, I the other, riding through the
attentive horsemen and carriage-lines, and making sure the face we
sought was absent, more or less discomposing everybody. The poet
finished his ode; he was cheered, of course. Mightily relieved, I
beheld the band resuming their instruments, for the cheering resembled
a senseless beating on brass shields. I felt that we English could do it
better. Temple from across the sector of the circle, running about two
feet in front of the statue, called aloud,

‘Richie! he’s not here!’

‘Not here!’ cried I.

The people gazed up at us, wondering at the tongue we talked.

‘Richie! now let ‘s lead these fellows off with a tiptop cheer!’

Little Temple crowed lustily.

The head of the statue turned from Temple to me.

I found the people falling back with amazed exclamations. I--so
prepossessed was I--simply stared at the sudden-flashing white of the
statue’s eyes. The eyes, from being an instant ago dull carved balls,
were animated. They were fixed on me. I was unable to give out a breath.
Its chest heaved; both bronze hands struck against the bosom.

‘Richmond! my son! Richie! Harry Richmond! Richmond Roy!’

That was what the statue gave forth.

My head was like a ringing pan. I knew it was my father, but my father
with death and strangeness, earth, metal, about him; and his voice was
like a human cry contending with earth and metal-mine was stifled. I
saw him descend. I dismounted. We met at the ropes and embraced. All his
figure was stiff, smooth, cold. My arms slid on him. Each time he spoke
I thought it an unnatural thing: I myself had not spoken once.

After glancing by hazard at the empty saddle of the bronze horse,
I called to mind more clearly the appalling circumstance which had
stupefied the whole crowd. They had heard a statue speak--had seen a
figure of bronze walk. For them it was the ancestor of their prince; it
was the famous dead old warrior of a hundred and seventy years ago set
thus in motion. Imagine the behaviour of people round a slain tiger that
does not compel them to fly, and may yet stretch out a dreadful paw!
Much so they pressed for a nearer sight of its walnut visage, and shrank
in the act. Perhaps I shared some of their sensations. I cannot tell:
my sensations were tranced. There was no warmth to revive me in the
gauntlet I clasped. I looked up at the sky, thinking that it had fallen
dark.



CHAPTER XVII. MY FATHER BREATHES, MOVES, AND SPEAKS

The people broke away from us like furrowed water as we advanced on each
side of the ropes toward the margravine’s carriage.

I became a perfectly mechanical creature: incapable, of observing, just
capable of taking an impression here and there; and in such cases the
impressions that come are stamped on hot wax; they keep the scene fresh;
they partly pervert it as well. Temple’s version is, I am sure, the
truer historical picture. He, however, could never repeat it twice
exactly alike, whereas I failed not to render image for image in clear
succession as they had struck me at the time. I could perceive that the
figure of the Prince Albrecht, in its stiff condition, was debarred from
vaulting, or striding, or stooping, so that the ropes were a barrier
between us. I saw the little Princess Ottilia eyeing us with an absorbed
comprehensive air quite unlike the manner of a child. Dots of heads,
curious faces, peering and starting eyes, met my vision. I heard sharp
talk in German, and a rider flung his arm, as if he wished to crash the
universe, and flew off. The margravine seemed to me more an implacable
parrot than a noble lady. I thought to myself: This is my father, and I
am not overjoyed or grateful. In the same way, I felt that the
daylight was bronze, and I did not wonder at it: nay, I reasoned on the
probability of a composition of sun and mould producing that colour. The
truth was, the powers of my heart and will were frozen; I thought
and felt at random. And I crave excuses for dwelling on such trifling
phenomena of the sensations, which have been useful to me by helping me
to realize the scene, even as at the time they obscured it.

According to Temple’s description, when the statue moved its head toward
him, a shudder went through the crowd, and a number of forefingers were
levelled at it, and the head moved toward me, marked of them all. Its
voice was answered by a dull puling scream from women, and the men
gaped. When it descended from the saddle, the act was not performed with
one bound, as I fancied, but difficultly; and it walked up to me like
a figure dragging logs at its heels. Half-a-dozen workmen ran to arrest
it; some townswomen fainted. There was a heavy altercation in German
between the statue and the superintendent of the arrangements. The sun
shone brilliantly on our march to the line of carriages where the Prince
of Eppenwelzen was talking to the margravine in a fury, and he dashed
away on his horse, after bellowing certain directions to his foresters
and the workmen, by whom we were surrounded; while the margravine talked
loudly and amiably, as though everything had gone well. Her watch was
out. She acknowledged my father’s bow, and overlooked him. She seemed to
have made her courtiers smile. The ladies and gentlemen obeyed the wave
of her hand by quitting the ground; the band headed a long line of the
commoner sort, and a body of foresters gathered the remnants and joined
them to the rear of the procession. A liveried groom led away Temple’s
horse and mine. Temple declared he could not sit after seeing the statue
descend from its pedestal.

Her Highness’s behaviour roughened as soon as the place was clear of
company. She spoke at my father impetuously, with manifest scorn and
reproach, struck her silver-mounted stick on the carriage panels,
again and again stamped her foot, lifting a most variable emphatic
countenance. Princess Ottilia tried to intercede. The margravine
clenched her hands, and, to one not understanding her speech, appeared
literally to blow the little lady off with the breath of her mouth.
Her whole bearing consisted of volleys of abuse, closed by magisterial
interrogations. Temple compared her Highness’s language to the running
out of Captain Welsh’s chaincable, and my father’s replies to the
hauling in: his sentences were short, they sounded like manful
protestations; I barely noticed them. Temple’s version of it went: ‘And
there was your father apologizing, and the margravine rating him,’ etc.
My father, as it happened, was careful not to open his lips wide on
account of the plaster, or thick coating of paint on his face. No one
would have supposed that he was burning with indignation; the fact
being, that to give vent to it, he would have had to exercise his
muscular strength; he was plastered and painted from head to foot. The
fixture of his wig and hat, too, constrained his skin, so that his looks
were no index of his feelings. I longed gloomily for the moment to come
when he would present himself to me in his natural form. He was not
sensible of the touch of my hand, nor I of his. There we had to stand
until the voluble portion of the margravine’s anger came to an end. She
shut her eyes and bowed curtly to our salute.

‘You have seen the last of me, madam,’ my father said to her whirling
carriage-wheels.

He tried to shake, and strained in his ponderous garments. Temple gazed
abashed. I knew not how to act. My father kept lifting his knees on the
spot as if practising a walk.

The tent was in its old place covering the bronze horse. A workman
stepped ahead of us, and we all went at a strange leisurely pace down
the hill through tall pinetrees to where a closed vehicle awaited us.
Here were also a couple of lackeys, who deposited my father on a bed of
moss, and with much effort pulled his huge boots off, leaving him in
red silk stockings. Temple and I snatched his gauntlets; Temple
fell backward, but we had no thought of laughter; people were seen
approaching, and the three of us jumped into the carriage. I had my
father’s living hand in mine to squeeze; feeling him scarcely yet the
living man I had sought, and with no great warmth of feeling. His hand
was very moist. Often I said, ‘Dear father!--Papa, I’m so glad at last,’
in answer to his short-breathed ‘Richie, my little lad, my son Richmond!
You found me out; you found me!’ We were conscious that his thick case
of varnished clothing was against us. One would have fancied from his
way of speaking that he suffered from asthma. I was now gifted with a
tenfold power of observation, and let nothing escape me.

Temple, sitting opposite, grinned cheerfully at times to encourage our
spirits; he had not recovered from his wonderment, nor had I introduced
him. My father, however, had caught his name. Temple (who might as
well have talked, I thought) was perpetually stealing secret glances of
abstracted perusal at him with a pair of round infant’s eyes, sucking
his reflections the while. My father broke our silence.

‘Mr. Temple, I have the honour,’ he said, as if about to cough; ‘the
honour of making your acquaintance; I fear you must surrender the hope
of making mine at present.’

Temple started and reddened like a little fellow detected in straying
from his spelling-book, which was the window-frame. In a minute or so
the fascination proved too strong for him; his eyes wandered from the
window and he renewed his shy inspection bit by bit as if casting up a
column of figures.

‘Yes, Mr. Temple, we are in high Germany,’ said my father.

It must have cost Temple cruel pain, for he was a thoroughly gentlemanly
boy, and he could not resist it. Finally he surprised himself in his
stealthy reckoning: arrived at the full-breech or buttoned waistband,
about half-way up his ascent from the red silk stocking, he would pause
and blink rapidly, sometimes jump and cough.

To put him at his ease, my father exclaimed, ‘As to this exterior,’ he
knocked his knuckles on the heaving hard surface, ‘I can only affirm
that it was, on horseback--ahem! particularly as the horse betrayed
no restivity, pronounced perfect! The sole complaint of our interior
concerns the resemblance we bear to a lobster. Human somewhere, I do
believe myself to be. I shall have to be relieved of my shell before I
can at all satisfactorily proclaim the fact. I am a human being, believe
me.’

He begged permission to take breath a minute.

‘I know you for my son’s friend, Mr. Temple: here is my son, my boy,
Harry Lepel Richmond Roy. Have patience: I shall presently stand
unshelled. I have much to relate; you likewise have your narrative in
store. That you should have lit on me at the critical instant is one
of those miracles which combine to produce overwhelming testimony--ay,
Richie! without a doubt there is a hand directing our destiny.’ His
speaking in such a strain, out of pure kindness to Temple, huskily,
with his painful attempt to talk like himself, revived his image as the
father of my heart and dreams, and stirred my torpid affection, though
it was still torpid enough, as may be imagined, when I state that I
remained plunged in contemplation of his stocking of red silk emerging
from the full bronzed breech, considering whether his comparison of
himself to a shell-fish might not be a really just one. We neither of us
regained our true natures until he was free of every vestige of the
garb of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth. Attendants were awaiting him at the
garden-gate of a beautiful villa partly girdled by rising fir-woods
on its footing of bright green meadow. They led him away, and us to
bath-rooms.



CHAPTER XVIII. WE PASS A DELIGHTFUL EVENING, AND I HAVE A MORNING VISION

In a long saloon ornamented with stags’ horns and instruments of the
chase, tusks of boars, spear-staves, boarknives, and silver horns, my
father, I, and Temple sat down to a memorable breakfast, my father
in his true form, dressed in black silken jacket and knee-breeches,
purple-stockings and pumps; without a wig, I thanked heaven to see.
How blithely he flung out his limbs and heaved his chest released from
confinement! His face was stained brownish, but we drank old Rhine wine,
and had no eye for appearances.

‘So you could bear it no longer, Richie?’ My father interrupted the
narrative I doled out, anxious for his, and he began, and I interrupted
him.

‘You did think of me often, papa, didn’t you?’

His eyes brimmed with tenderness.

‘Think of you!’ he sighed.

I gave him the account of my latest adventures in a few panting breaths,
suppressing the Bench. He set my face to front him.

‘We are two fools, Mr. Temple,’ he said.

‘No, sir,’ said Temple.

‘Now you speak, papa,’ said I.

He smiled warmly.

‘Richie begins to remember me.’

I gazed at him to show it was true.

‘I do, papa--I’m not beginning to.’

At his request, I finished the tale of my life at school. ‘Ah, well!
that was bad fortune; this is good!’ he exclaimed. ‘Tis your father, my
son: ‘tis day-light, though you look at it through a bed-curtain, and
think you are half-dreaming. Now then for me, Richie.’

My father went on in this wise excitedly:

‘I was laying the foundation of your fortune here, my boy. Heavens! when
I was in that bronze shell I was astonished only at my continence in not
bursting. You have grown,--you have shot up and filled out. I register
my thanks to your grandfather Beltham; the same, in a minor degree, to
Captain Jasper Welsh. Between that man Rippenger and me there shall be
dealings. He flogged you: let that pass. He exposed you to the contempt
of your school-fellows because of a breach in my correspondence with a
base-born ferule-swinger. What are we coming to? Richie, my son, I was
building a future for you here. And Colonel Goodwin-Colonel Goodwin,
you encountered him too, and his marriageable daughter--I owe it to them
that I have you here! Well, in the event of my sitting out the period
this morning as the presentment of Prince Albrecht, I was to have won
something would have astonished that unimpressionable countryman of
ours. Goodness gracious, my boy! when I heard your English shout, it
went to my marrow. Could they expect me to look down on my own flesh
and blood, on my son--my son Richmond--after a separation of years, and
continue a statue? Nay, I followed my paternal impulse. Grant that the
show was spoilt, does the Markgrafin insist on my having a bronze heart
to carry on her pastime? Why, naturally, I deplore a failure, let the
cause be what it will. Whose regrets can eclipse those of the principal
actor? Quotha! as our old Plays have it. Regrets? Did I not for fifteen
minutes and more of mortal time sit in view of a multitude, motionless,
I ask you, like a chiselled block of stone,--and the compact was one
quarter of an hour, and no farther? That was my stipulation. I told
her--I can hold out one quarter of an hour: I pledged myself to it.
Who, then, is to blame? I was exposed to view twenty-three minutes, odd
seconds. Is there not some ancient story of a monstrous wretch baked in
his own bull? My situation was as bad. If I recollect aright, he could
roar; no such relief was allowed to me. And I give you my word, Richie,
lads both, that while that most infernal Count Fretzel was pouring
forth his execrable humdrum, I positively envied the privilege of an old
palsied fellow, chief boatman of the forest lake, for, thinks I, hang
him! he can nod his head and I can not. Let me assure you, twenty
minutes of an ordeal like that,--one posture, mind you, no raising
of your eyelids, taking your breath mechanically, and your heart
beating--jumping like an enraged balletdancer boxed in your bosom--a
literal description, upon my honour; and not only jumping, jumping
every now and then, I may say, with a toe in your throat: I was
half-choked:--well, I say, twenty minutes, twenty-seven minutes and
a half of that, getting on, in fact, to half-an-hour, it is
superhuman!--by heavens, it is heroical!

And observe my reward: I have a son--my only one. I have been divided
from him for years; I am establishing his fortune; I know he is provided
with comforts: Richie, you remember the woman Waddy? A faithful soul!
She obtained my consent at last--previously I had objections; in fact,
your address was withheld from the woman--to call at your school. She
saw Rippenger, a girl of considerable attractions. She heard you were
located at Riversley: I say, I know the boy is comfortably provided for;
but we have been separated since he was a little creature with curls on
his forehead, scarce breeched.’

I protested:

‘Papa, I have been in jacket and trousers I don’t know how long.’

‘Let me pursue,’ said my father. ‘And to show you, Richie, it is a
golden age ever when you and I are together, and ever shall be till we
lose our manly spirit, and we cling to that,--till we lose our princely
spirit, which we never will abandon--perish rather!--I drink to you, and
challenge you; and, mind you, old Hock wine has charms. If Burgundy is
the emperor of wines, Hock is the empress. For youngsters, perhaps, I
should except the Hock that gets what they would fancy a trifle pique,
turned with age, so as to lose in their opinion its empress flavour.’

Temple said modestly: ‘I should call that the margravine of wines.’

My father beamed on him with great approving splendour. ‘Join us, Mr.
Temple; you are a man of wit, and may possibly find this specimen worthy
of you. This wine has a history. You are drinking wine with blood in it.
Well, I was saying, the darling of my heart has been torn from me; I am
in a foreign land; foreign, that is, by birth, and on the whole foreign.
Yes!--I am the cynosure of eyes; I am in a singular posture, a singular
situation; I hear a cry in the tongue of my native land, and what I
presume is my boy’s name: I look, I behold him, I follow a parent’s
impulse. On my soul! none but a fish-father could have stood against it.

Well, for this my reward is--and I should have stepped from a cathedral
spire just the same, if I had been mounted on it--that I, I,--and the
woman knows all my secret--I have to submit to the foul tirade of a
vixen.

She drew language, I protest, from the slums. And I entreat you, Mr.
Temple, with your “margravine of wines”--which was very neatly said, to
be sure--note you this curious point for the confusion of Radicals in
your after life; her Highness’s pleasure was to lend her tongue to the
language--or something like it--of a besotted fish-wife; so! very well,
and just as it is the case with that particular old Hock you youngsters
would disapprove of, and we cunning oldsters know to contain more
virtues in maturity than a nunnery of May-blooming virgins, just so
the very faults of a royal lady-royal by birth and in temper a
termagant--impart a perfume! a flavour! You must age; you must live in
Courts, you must sound the human bosom, rightly to appreciate it. She is
a woman of the most malicious fine wit imaginable.

She is a generous woman, a magnanimous woman; wear her chains and she
will not brain you with her club. She is the light, the centre of every
society where she appears, like what shall I say? like the moon in a
bowl of old Rhenish. And you will drain that bowl to the bottom to seize
her, as it were--catch a correct idea of her; ay, and your brains are
drowned in the attempt. Yes, Richie; I was aware of your residence at
Riversley. Were you reminded of your wandering dada on Valentine’s day?
Come, my boy, we have each of us a thousand things to relate. I may be
dull--I do not understand what started you on your journey in search of
me. An impulse? An accident? Say, a directing angel! We rest our legs
here till evening, and then we sup. You will be astonished to hear that
you have dined. ‘Tis the fashion with the Germans. I promise you good
wine shall make it up to you for the return to school-habits. We sup,
and we pack our scanty baggage, and we start tonight. Brook no insult
at Courts if you are of material value: if not, it is unreservedly a
question whether you like kickings.’

My father paused, yawned and stretched, to be rid of the remainder of
his aches and stiffness. Out of a great yawn he said:

‘Dear lads, I have fallen into the custom of the country; I crave your
permission that I may smoke. Wander, if you choose, within hail of me,
or sit by me, if you can bear it, and talk of your school-life, and your
studies. Your aunt Dorothy, Richie? She is well? I know not her like. I
could bear to hear of any misfortune but that she suffered pain.

My father smoked his cigar peacefully. He had laid a guitar on his
knees, and flipped a string, or chafed over all the strings, and plucked
and thrummed them as his mood varied. We chatted, and watched the going
down of the sun, and amused ourselves idly, fermenting as we were.
Anything that gave pleasure to us two boys pleased and at once occupied
my father. It was without aid from Temple’s growing admiration of him
that I recovered my active belief and vivid delight in his presence. My
younger days sprang up beside me like brothers. No one talked, looked,
flashed, frowned, beamed, as he did! had such prompt liveliness as he!
such tenderness! No one was ever so versatile in playfulness. He took
the colour of the spirits of the people about him. His vivacious or
sedate man-of-the-world tone shifted to playfellow’s fun in a twinkling.
I used as a little fellow to think him larger than he really was, but
he was of good size, inclined to be stout; his eyes were grey,
rather prominent, and his forehead sloped from arched eyebrows. So
conversational were his eyes and brows that he could persuade you to
imagine he was carrying on a dialogue without opening his mouth. His
voice was charmingly clear; his laughter confident, fresh, catching,
the outburst of his very self, as laughter should be. Other sounds of
laughter were like echoes.

Strange to say, I lost the links of my familiarity with him when he left
us on a short visit to his trunks and portmanteaux, and had to lean on
Temple, who tickled but rejoiced me by saying: ‘Richie, your father is
just the one I should like to be secretary to.’

We thought it a pity to have to leave this nice foreign place
immediately. I liked the scenery, and the wine, and what I supposed to
be the habit of the gentlemen here to dress in silks. On my father’s
return to us I asked him if we could not stay till morning.

‘Till morning, then,’ he said: ‘and to England with the first lark.’

His complexion was ruddier; his valet had been at work to restore it;
he was getting the sanguine hue which coloured my recollection of him.
Wearing a black velvet cap and a Spanish furred cloak, he led us over
the villa. In Sarkeld he resided at the palace, and generally at the
lake-palace on the removal of the Court thither. The margravine had
placed the villa, which was her own property, at his disposal, the
better to work out their conspiracy.

‘It would have been mine!’ said my father, bending suddenly to my ear,
and humming his philosophical ‘heigho,’ as he stepped on in minuet
fashion. We went through apartments rich with gilded oak and pine
panellings: in one was a rough pattern of a wooden horse opposite a
mirror; by no means a figure of a horse, but apparently a number of
pieces contributed by a carpenter’s workshop, having a rueful seat in
the middle. My father had practised the attitude of Prince Albrecht
Wohlgemuth on it. ‘She timed me five and twenty minutes there only
yesterday,’ he said; and he now supposed he had sat the bronze horse as
a statue in public view exactly thirty-seven minutes and a quarter. Tubs
full of colouring liquid to soak the garments of the prince, pots
of paint, and paint and plaster brushes, hinted the magnitude of the
preparations.

‘Here,’ said my father in another apartment, ‘I was this morning
apparelled at seven o’clock: and I would have staked my right arm up to
the collar-bone on the success of the undertaking!’

‘Weren’t they sure to have found it out in the end, papa?’ I inquired.

‘I am not so certain of that,’ he rejoined: ‘I cannot quaff consolation
from that source. I should have been covered up after exhibition; I
should have been pronounced imperfect in my fitting-apparatus; the
sculptor would have claimed me, and I should have been enjoying the
fruits of a brave and harmless conspiracy to do honour to an illustrious
prince, while he would have been moulding and casting an indubitable
bronze statue in my image. A fig for rumours! We show ourself; we are
caught from sight; we are again on show. Now this being successfully
done, do you see, Royalty declines to listen to vulgar tattle.
Presumably, Richie, it was suspected by the Court that the margravine
had many months ago commanded the statue at her own cost, and had set
her mind on winning back the money. The wonder of it was my magnificent
resemblance to the defunct. I sat some three hours before the old
warrior’s portraits in the dining-saloon of the lake-palace. Accord me
one good spell of meditation over a tolerable sketch, I warrant myself
to represent him to the life, provided that he was a personage: I
incline to stipulate for handsome as well. On my word of honour as a man
and a gentleman, I pity the margravine--my poor good Frau Feldmarschall!
Now, here, Richie,’--my father opened a side-door out of an elegant
little room into a spacious dark place, ‘here is her cabinet-theatre,
where we act German and French comediettas in Spring and Autumn. I have
superintended it during the two or more years of my stay at the Court.
Humph! ‘tis over.’

He abruptly closed the door. His dress belonged to the part of a Spanish
nobleman, personated by him in a Play called The Hidalgo Enraged, he
said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the melancholy door, behind
which gay scenes had sparkled.

‘Papa!’ said I sadly, for consolation.

‘You’re change for a sovereign to the amount of four hundred and
forty-nine thousand shillings every time you speak!’ cried he, kissing
my forehead.

He sparkled in good earnest on hearing that I had made acquaintance with
the little Princess Ottilia. What I thought of her, how she looked at
me, what I said to her, what words she answered, how the acquaintance
began, who were observers of it,--I had to repair my omission to mention
her by furnishing a precise description of the circumstances, describing
her face and style, repeating her pretty English.

My father nodded: he thought I exaggerated that foreign English of hers;
but, as I said, I was new to it and noticed it. He admitted the greater
keenness of attention awakened by novelty.

‘Only,’ said he, ‘I rather wonder--’ and here he smiled at me
inquiringly. ‘‘Tis true,’ he added, ‘a boy of fourteen or fifteen--ay,
Richie, have your fun out. A youngster saw the comic side of her. Do you
know, that child has a remarkable character? Her disposition is totally
unfathomable. You are a deep reader of English poetry, I hope; she
adores it, and the English Navy. She informed me that if she had been
the English people she would have made Nelson king. The Royal family
of England might see objections to that, I told her. Cries she:
“Oh! anything for a sea-hero.” You will find these young princes and
princesses astonishingly revolutionary when they entertain brains. Now
at present, just at present, an English naval officer, and a poet, stand
higher in the esteem of that young Princess Ottilia than dukes, kings,
or emperors. So you have seen her!’ my father ejaculated musingly, and
hummed, and said: ‘By the way, we must be careful not to offend
our grandpapa Beltham, Richie. Good acres--good anchorage; good
coffers--good harbourage. Regarding poetry, my dear boy, you ought to
be writing it, for I do--the diversion of leisure hours, impromptus.
In poetry, I would scorn anything but impromptus. I was saying, Richie,
that if tremendous misfortune withholds from you your legitimate
prestige, you must have the substantial element. ‘Tis your springboard
to vault by, and cushions on the other side if you make a miss and fall.
‘Tis the essence if you have not the odour.’

I followed my father’s meaning as the shadow of a bird follows it in
sunlight; it made no stronger an impression than a flying shadow on the
grass; still I could verify subsequently that I had penetrated him--I
had caught the outline of his meaning--though I was little accustomed
to his manner of communicating his ideas: I had no notion of what he
touched on with the words, prestige, essence, and odour.

My efforts to gather the reason for his having left me neglected at
school were fruitless. ‘Business, business! sad necessity! hurry,
worry-the-hounds!’ was his nearest approach to an explicit answer; and
seeing I grieved his kind eyes, I abstained. Nor did I like to defend
Mr. Rippenger for expecting to be paid. We came to that point once
or twice, when so sharply wronged did he appear, and vehement
and indignant, that I banished thoughts which marred my luxurious
contentment in hearing him talk and sing, and behave in his old ways and
new habits.

Plain velvet was his dress at dinner. We had a yellow Hock. Temple’s
meditative face over it, to discover the margravine, or something, in
its flavour, was a picture. It was an evening of incessant talking;
no telling of events straightforwardly, but all by fits--all here and
there. My father talked of Turkey, so I learnt he had been in that
country; Temple of the routine of our life at Riversley; I of Kiomi,
the gipsy girl; then we two of Captain Jasper Welsh; my father of the
Princess Ottilia. When I alluded to the margravine, he had a word to say
of Mrs. Waddy; so I learnt she had been in continual correspondence with
him, and had cried heavily about me, poor soul. Temple laughed out
a recollection of Captain Bulsted’s ‘hic, haec, hoc’; I jumped Janet
Ilchester up on the table; my father expatiated on the comfort of a
volume of Shakespeare to an exiled Englishman. We drank to one another,
and heartily to the statue. My father related the history of the
margravine’s plot in duck-and-drake skips, and backward to his first
introduction to her at some Austrian Baths among the mountains. She
wanted amusement--he provided it; she never let him quit her sight from
that moment.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘she has lost me!’ He drew out of his pocket-book
a number of designs for the statue of Prince Albrecht, to which the
margravine’s initials were appended, and shuffled them, and sighed, and
said: ‘Most complete arrangements! most complete! No body of men were
ever so well drilled as those fellows up at Bella Vista--could not have
been! And at the climax, in steps the darling boy for whom I laboured
and sweated, and down we topple incontinently! Nothing would have shaken
me but the apparition of my son! I was proof against everything but
that! I sat invincible for close upon an hour--call it an hour! Not
a muscle of me moved: I repeat, the heart in my bosom capered like an
independent organ; had it all its own way, leaving me mine, until Mr.
Temple, take my word for it, there is a guiding hand in some families;
believe it, and be serene in adversity. The change of life at a merry
Court to life in a London alley will exercise our faith. But the
essential thing is that Richie has been introduced here, and I intend
him to play a part here. The grandson and heir of one of the
richest commoners in England--I am not saying commoner as a term of
reproach--possessed of a property that turns itself over and doubles
itself every ten years, may--mind you, may--on such a solid foundation
as that!--and as to birth, your Highness has only to grant us a private
interview.’

Temple was dazed by this mystifying address to him; nor could I
understand it.

‘Why, papa, you always wished for me to go into Parliament,’ said I.

‘I do,’ he replied, ‘and I wish you to lead the London great world.
Such topics are for by-and-by. Adieu to them!’ He kissed his wafting
finger-tips.

We fell upon our random talk again with a merry rattle.

I had to give him a specimen of my piano-playing and singing.

He shook his head. ‘The cricketer and the scholar have been developed
at the expense of the musician; and music, Richie, music unlocks the
chamber of satinrose.’

Late at night we separated. Temple and I slept in companion-rooms.
Deadly drowsy, the dear little fellow sat on the edge of my bed
chattering of his wonder. My dreams led me wandering with a ship’s diver
under the sea, where we walked in a light of pearls and exploded old
wrecks. I was assuring the glassy man that it was almost as clear
beneath the waves as above, when I awoke to see my father standing over
me in daylight; and in an ecstasy I burst into sobs.

‘Here, Richie’--he pressed fresh violets on my nostrils--‘you have had
a morning visitor. Quick out of bed, and you will see the little fairy
crossing the meadow.’

I leapt to the window in time to have in view the little Princess
Ottilia, followed by her faithful gaunt groom, before she was lost in
the shadow of the fir-trees.



CHAPTER XIX. OUR RETURN HOMEWARD

We started for England at noon, much against my secret wishes; but my
father would not afford the margravine time to repent of her violent
language and injustice toward him. Reflection increased his indignation.
Anything that went wrong on the first stages of the journey caused him
to recapitulate her epithets and reply to them proudly. He confided to
me in Cologne Cathedral that the entire course of his life was a grand
plot, resembling an unfinished piece of architecture, which might, at a
future day, prove the wonder of the world: and he had, therefore, packed
two dozen of hoar old (uralt: he used comical German) Hock for a present
to my grandfather Beltham, in the hope of its being found acceptable.

‘For, Richie,’ said he, ‘you may not know--and it is not to win your
thanks I inform you of it--that I labour unremittingly in my son’s
interests. I have established him, on his majority, in Germany, at a
Court. My object now is to establish him in England. Promise me that it
shall be the decided endeavour of your energies and talents to rise to
the height I point out to you? You promise, I perceive,’ he added, sharp
in detecting the unpleasant predicament of a boy who is asked to speak
priggishly. So then I could easily promise with a firm voice. He dropped
certain explosive hints, which reminded me of the funny ideas of my
state and greatness I had when a child. I shrugged at them; I cared
nothing for revelations to come by-and-by. My object was to unite my
father and grandfather on terms of friendship.

This was the view that now absorbed and fixed my mind. To have him
a frequent visitor at Riversley, if not a resident in the house,
enlivening them all, while I, perhaps, trifled a cavalry sabre, became
one of my settled dreams. The difficult part of the scheme appeared to
me the obtaining of my father’s consent. I mentioned it, and he said
immediately that he must have his freedom. ‘Now, for instance,’ said he,
‘what is my desire at this moment? I have always a big one perched on
a rock in the distance; but I speak of my present desire. And let it
be supposed that the squire is one of us: we are returning to England.
Well, I want to show you a stork’s nest. We are not far enough South for
the stork to build here. It is a fact, Richie, that I do want to show
you the bird for luck, and as a feature of the country. And in me, a
desire to do a thing partakes of the impetus of steam.

Well, you see we are jogging home to England. I resist myself for duty’s
sake: that I can do. But if the squire were here with his yea and his
nay, by heavens! I should be off to the top of the Rhine like a tornado.
I submit to circumstances: I cannot, and I will not, be dictated to by
men.’

‘That seems to me rather unreasonable,’ I remonstrated.

‘It is; I am ashamed of it,’ he answered. ‘Do as you will, Richie; set
me down at Riversley, but under no slight, mark you. I keep my honour
intact, like a bottled cordial; my unfailing comfort in adversity! I
hand it to you, my son, on my death-bed, and say, “You have there the
essence of my life. Never has it been known of me that I swallowed an
insult.”’

‘Then, papa, I shall have a talk with the squire.’

‘Make good your ground in the castle,’ said he. ‘I string a guitar
outside. You toss me a key from the walls. If there is room, and I
have leisure, I enter. If not, you know I am paving your way in other
quarters. Riversley, my boy, is an excellent foothold and fortress:
Riversley is not the world. At Riversley I should have to wear a double
face, and, egad! a double stomach-bag, like young Jack feeding with the
giant--one full of ambition, the other of provender. That place is our
touchstone to discover whether we have prudence. We have, I hope. And we
will have, Mr. Temple, a pleasant day or two in Paris.’

It was his habit to turn off the bent of these conversations by drawing
Temple into them. Temple declared there was no feeling we were in a
foreign country while he was our companion. We simply enjoyed strange
scenes, looking idly out of our windows. Our recollection of the
strangest scene ever witnessed filled us with I know not what scornful
pleasure, and laughed in the background at any sight or marvel
pretending to amuse us. Temple and I cantered over the great Belgian
battlefield, talking of Bella Vista tower, the statue, the margravine,
our sour milk and black-bread breakfast, the little Princess Ottilia,
with her ‘It is my question,’ and ‘You were kind to my lambs, sir,’
thoughtless of glory and dead bones. My father was very differently
impressed. He was in an exultant glow, far outmatching the bloom on our
faces when we rejoined him. I cried,

‘Papa, if the prince won’t pay for a real statue, I will, and I’ll
present it in your name!’

‘To the nation?’ cried he, staring, and arresting his arm in what seemed
an orchestral movement.

‘To the margravine!’

He heard, but had to gather his memory. He had been fighting the battle,
and made light of Bella Vista. I found that incidents over which a
day or two had rolled lost their features to him. He never smiled at
recollections. If they were forced on him noisily by persons he liked,
perhaps his face was gay, but only for a moment. The gaiety of his
nature drew itself from hot-springs of hopefulness: our arrival in
England, our interviews there, my majority Burgundy, my revisitation
of Germany--these events to come gave him the aspect children wear out
a-Maying or in an orchard. He discussed the circumstances connected
with the statue as dry matter-of-fact, and unless it was his duty to be
hilarious at the dinner-table, he was hardly able to respond to a call
on his past life and mine. His future, too, was present tense: ‘We do
this,’ not ‘we will do this’; so that, generally, no sooner did we speak
of an anticipated scene than he was acting in it. I studied him eagerly,
I know, and yet quite unconsciously, and I came to no conclusions. Boys
are always putting down the ciphers of their observations of people
beloved by them, but do not add up a sum total.

Our journey home occupied nearly eleven weeks, owing to stress of money
on two occasions. In Brussels I beheld him with a little beggar-girl in
his arms.

‘She has asked me for a copper coin, Richie,’ he said, squeezing her fat
cheeks to make cherries of her lips.

I recommended him to give her a silver one.

‘Something, Richie, I must give the little wench, for I have kissed her,
and, in my list of equivalents, gold would be the sole form of repayment
after that. You must buy me off with honour, my boy.’

I was compelled to receive a dab from the child’s nose, by way of a
kiss, in return for buying him off with honour.

The child stumped away on the pavement fronting our hotel, staring at
its fist that held the treasure.

‘Poor pet wee drab of it!’ exclaimed my father. ‘One is glad, Richie,
to fill a creature out of one’s emptiness. Now she toddles; she is
digesting it rapidly. The last performance of one’s purse is rarely so
pleasant as that. I owe it to her that I made the discovery in time.’

In this manner I also made the discovery that my father had no further
supply of money, none whatever. How it had run out without his remarking
it, he could not tell; he could only assure me that he had become
aware of the fact while searching vainly for a coin to bestow on the
beggar-girl. I despatched a letter attested by a notary of the city,
applying for money to the banker to whom Colonel Goodwin had introduced
me on my arrival on the Continent. The money came, and in the meantime
we had formed acquaintances and entertained them; they were chiefly
half-pay English military officers, dashing men. One, a Major Dykes, my
father established in our hotel, and we carried him on to Paris, where,
consequent upon our hospitalities, the purse was again deficient.

Two reasons for not regretting it were adduced by my father; firstly,
that it taught me not to despise the importance of possessing money;
secondly, that we had served our country by assisting Dykes, who was on
the scent of a new and terrible weapon of destruction, which he believed
to be in the hands of the French Government. Major Dykes disappeared on
the scent, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that we had done our
best toward saving the Navy of Great Britain from being blown out of
water. Temple and I laughed over Major Dykes, and he became our puppet
for by-play, on account of his enormous whiskers, his passion for strong
drinks, and his air of secresy. My father’s faith in his patriotic
devotedness was sufficient to withhold me from suspicions of his
character. Whenever my instinct, or common sense, would have led me
to differ with my father in opinion fun supervened; I was willing that
everything in the world should be as he would have it be, and took up
with a spirit of laughter, too happy in having won him, in having fished
him out of the deep sea at one fling of the net, as he said, to care for
accuracy of sentiment in any other particular.

Our purse was at its lowest ebb; he suggested no means of replenishing
it, and I thought of none. He had heard that it was possible to live in
Paris upon next to nothing with very great luxury, so we tried it; we
strolled through the lilac aisles among bonnes and babies, attended
military spectacles, rode on omnibuses, dined on the country heights,
went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere
front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would
have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical
influence of my father’s address, a mixture of the ceremonious and the
affable such as the people could not withstand.

‘The poet is perhaps, on the whole, more exhilarating than the
alderman,’ he said.

These were the respective names given by him to the empty purse and the
full purse. We vowed we preferred the poet.

‘Ay,’ said he, ‘but for all that the alderman is lighter on his feet: I
back him to be across the Channel first. The object of my instructions
to you will be lost, Richie, if I find you despising the Alderman’s
Pegasus. On money you mount. We are literally chained here, you know,
there is no doubt about it; and we are adding a nail to our fetters
daily. True, you are accomplishing the Parisian accent. Paris has also
this immense advantage over all other cities: ‘tis the central hotel
on the high-road of civilization. In Paris you meet your friends to
a certainty; it catches them every one in turn; so now we must abroad
early and late, and cut for trumps.’ A meeting with a friend of my
father, Mr. Monterez Williams, was the result of our resolute adoption
of this system. He helped us on to Boulogne, where my father met another
friend, to whom he gave so sumptuous a dinner that we had not money
enough to pay the hotel bill.

‘Now observe the inconvenience of leaving Paris,’ said he. ‘Ten to one
we shall have to return. We will try a week’s whistling on the jetty;
and if no luck comes, and you will admit, Richie--Mr. Temple, I call
your attention to it--that luck will scarcely come in profuse expedition
through the narrow neck of a solitary seaport, why, we must return to
Paris.’

I proposed to write to my aunt Dorothy for money, but he would not hear
of that. After two or three days of whistling, I saw my old friend, Mr.
Bannerbridge, step out of the packetboat. On condition of my writing to
my aunt to say that I was coming home, he advanced me the sum we were in
need of, grudgingly though, and with the prediction that we should break
down again, which was verified. It occurred only a stage from Riversley,
where my grandfather’s name was good as coin of the realm. Besides, my
father remained at the inn to guarantee the payment of the bill, while
Temple and I pushed on in a fly with the two dozen of Hock. It could
hardly be called a break-down, but my father was not unwilling for me
to regard it in that light. Among his parting remarks was an impressive
adjuration to me to cultivate the squire’s attachment at all costs.

‘Do this,’ he said, ‘and I shall know that the lesson I have taught you
on your journey homeward has not been thrown away. My darling boy! my
curse through life has been that the sense of weight in money is a sense
I am and was born utterly a stranger to. The consequence is, my grandest
edifices fall; there is no foundation for them. Not that I am worse,
understand me, than under a temporary cloud, and the blessing of heaven
has endowed me with a magnificent constitution. Heaven forefend that I
should groan for myself, or you for me! But digest what you have learnt,
Richie; press nothing on the squire; be guided by the advice of that
esteemed and admirable woman, your aunt Dorothy. And, by the way, you
may tell her confidentially of the progress of your friendship with the
Princess Ottilia. Here I shall employ my hours in a tranquil study of
nature until I see you.’ Thus he sped me forward.

We sighted Riversley about mid-day on a sunny June morning. Compared
with the view from Bella Vista, our firs looked scanty, our heath-tracts
dull, as places having no page of history written on them, our fresh
green meadows not more than commonly homely. I was so full of my sense
of triumph in my adventurous journey and the recovery of my father, that
I gazed on the old Grange from a towering height. The squire was on the
lawn, surrounded by a full company: the Ilchesters, the Ambroses, the
Wilfords, Captain and Squire Gregory Bulsted, the Rubreys, and others,
all bending to roses, to admire, smell, or pluck. Charming groups of
ladies were here and there; and Temple whispered as we passed them:

‘We beat foreigners in our women, Richie.’

I, making it my business to talk with perfect unconcern, replied

‘Do you think so? Perhaps. Not in all cases’; all the while I was
exulting at the sweet beams of England radiating from these dear
early-morning-looking women.

My aunt Dorothy swam up to me, and, kissing me, murmured:

‘Take no rebuff from your grandpapa, darling.’

My answer was: ‘I have found him!’

Captain Bulsted sang out our names; I caught sight of Julia Rippenger’s
face; the squire had his back turned to me, which reminded me of my
first speech with Captain Jasper Welsh, and I thought to myself, I know
something of the world now, and the thing is to keep a good temper. Here
there was no wire-coil to intercept us, so I fronted him quickly.

‘Hulloa!’ he cried, and gave me his shoulder.

‘Temple is your guest, sir,’ said I.

He was obliged to stretch out his hand to Temple.

A prompt instinct warned me that I must show him as much Beltham as I
could summon.

‘Dogs and horses all right, sir?’ I asked.

Captain Bulsted sauntered near.

‘Here, William,’ said the squire, ‘tell this fellow about my stables.’

‘In excellent condition, Harry Richmond,’ returned the captain.

‘Oh! he ‘s got a new name, I ‘ll swear,’ said the squire.

‘Not I!’

‘Then what have you got of your trip, eh?’

‘A sharper eye than I had, sir.’

‘You’ve been sharpening it in London, have you?’

‘I’ve been a little farther than London, squire.’

‘Well, you’re not a liar.’

‘There, you see the lad can stand fire!’ Captain Bulsted broke in.
‘Harry Richmond, I’m proud to shake your hand, but I’ll wait till you’re
through the ceremony with your grandad.’

The squire’s hands were crossed behind him. I smiled boldly in his face.

‘Shall I make the tour of you to get hold of one of them, sir?’ He
frowned and blinked.

‘Shuffle in among the ladies; you seem to know how to make friends
among them,’ he said, and pretended to disengage his right hand for the
purpose of waving it toward one of the groups.

I seized it, saying heartily, ‘Grandfather, upon my honour, I love you,
and I’m glad to be home again.’

‘Mind you, you’re not at home till you’ve begged Uberly’s pardon in
public, you know what for,’ he rejoined.

‘Leaving the horse at that inn is on my conscience,’ said I.

The squire grumbled a bit.

‘Suppose he kicks?’ said I; and the captain laughed, and the squire too,
and I was in such high spirits I thought of a dozen witty suggestions
relative to the seat of the conscience, and grieved for a minute at
going to the ladies.

All the better; keep him there Captain Bulsted convoyed me to pretty
Irish-eyed Julia Rippenger. Temple had previously made discovery of
Janet Ilchester. Relating our adventures on different parts of the lawn,
we both heard that Colonel Goodwin and his daughter had journeyed down
to Riversley to smooth the way for my return; so my easy conquest of the
squire was not at all wonderful; nevertheless, I maintained my sense
of triumph, and was assured in my secret heart that I had a singular
masterfulness, and could, when I chose to put it forth, compel my
grandfather to hold out his hand to my father as he had done to me.

Julia Rippenger was a guest at Riversley through a visit paid to her by
my aunt Dorothy in alarm at my absence. The intention was to cause
the squire a distraction. It succeeded; for the old man needed lively
prattle of a less childish sort than Janet Ilchester’s at his elbow,
and that young lady, though true enough in her fashion, was the ardent
friend of none but flourishing heads; whereas Julia, finding my name
under a cloud at Riversley, spoke of me, I was led to imagine by Captain
Bulsted, as a ballad hero, a gloriful fellow, a darling whose deeds were
all pardonable--a mere puff of smoke in the splendour of his nature.

‘To hear the young lady allude to me in that style!’ he confided to my
ear, with an ineffable heave of his big chest.

Certain good influences, at any rate, preserved the squire from
threatening to disinherit me. Colonel Goodwin had spoken to him very
manfully and wisely as to my relations with my father. The squire, it
was assumed by my aunt, and by Captain Bulsted and Julia, had undertaken
to wink at my father’s claims on my affection. All three vehemently
entreated me to make no mention of the present of Hock to him, and not
to attempt to bring about an interview. Concerning the yellow wine I
disregarded their advice, for I held it to be a point of filial duty,
and an obligation religiously contracted beneath a cathedral dome; so I
performed the task of offering the Hock, stating that it was of ancient
birth. The squire bunched his features; he tutored his temper, and said
not a word. I fancied all was well. Before I tried the second step,
Captain Bulsted rode over to my father, who himself generously enjoined
the prudent course, in accordance with his aforegone precepts. He was
floated off, as he termed it, from the inn where he lay stranded, to
London, by I knew not what heaven-sent gift of money, bidding me keep
in view the grand career I was to commence at Dipwell on arriving at
my majority. I would have gone with him had he beckoned a finger.
The four-and-twenty bottles of Hock were ranged in a line for the
stable-boys to cock-shy at them under the squire’s supervision and my
enforced attendance, just as revolutionary criminals are executed. I
felt like the survivor of friends, who had seen their blood flow.

He handed me a cheque for the payment of debts incurred in my
recent adventures. Who could help being grateful for it? And yet his
remorseless spilling of the kindly wine full of mellow recollections of
my father and the little princess, drove the sense of gratitude out of
me.



CHAPTER XX. NEWS OF A FRESH CONQUEST OF MY FATHER’S

Temple went to sea. The wonder is that I did not go with him: we were
both in agreement that adventures were the only things worth living for,
and we despised English fellows who had seen no place but England. I
could not bear the long separation from my father that was my reason for
not insisting on the squire’s consent to my becoming a midshipman. After
passing a brilliant examination, Temple had the good fortune to join
Captain Bulsted’s ship, and there my honest-hearted friend dismally
composed his letter of confession, letting me know that he had
been untrue to friendship, and had proposed to Janet Ilchester, and
interchanged vows with her. He begged my forgiveness, but he did love
her so!--he hoped I would not mind. I sent him a reproachful answer;
I never cared for him more warmly than when I saw the letter shoot the
slope of the postoffice mouth. Aunt Dorothy undertook to communicate
assurances of my undying affection for him. As for Janet--Temple’s
letter, in which he spoke of her avowed preference for Oriental
presents, and declared his intention of accumulating them on his
voyages, was a harpoon in her side. By means of it I worried and
terrified her until she was glad to have it all out before the squire.
What did he do? He said that Margery, her mother, was niggardly; a girl
wanted presents, and I did not act up to my duty; I ought to buy Turkey
and Tunis to please her, if she had a mind for them.

The further she was flattered the faster she cried; she had the face of
an old setter with these hideous tears. The squire promised her fifty
pounds per annum in quarterly payments, that she might buy what presents
she liked, and so tie herself to constancy. He said aside to me, as
if he had a knowledge of the sex--‘Young ladies must have lots of
knickknacks, or their eyes ‘ll be caught right and left, remember that.’
I should have been delighted to see her caught. She talked of love in a
ludicrous second-hand way, sending me into fits of disgusted laughter.
On other occasions her lips were not hypocritical, and her figure
anything but awkward. She was a bold, plump girl, fond of male society.
Heriot enraptured her. I believed at the time she would have appointed
a year to marry him in, had he put the question. But too many women were
in love with Heriot. He and I met Kiomi on the road to the race-course
on the Southdowns; the prettiest racecourse in England, shut against
gipsies. A bare-footed swarthy girl ran beside our carriage and tossed
us flowers. He and a friend of his, young Lord Destrier, son of the
Marquis of Edbury, who knew my father well, talked and laughed with her,
and thought her so very handsome that I likewise began to stare, and I
suddenly called ‘Kiomi!’ She bounded back into the hedge. This was our
second meeting. It would have been a pleasant one had not Heriot and
Destrier pretended all sorts of things about our previous acquaintance.
Neither of us, they said, had made a bad choice, but why had we
separated? She snatched her hand out of mine with a grin of anger like
puss in a fury. We had wonderful fun with her. They took her to a great
house near the race-course, and there, assisted by one of the young
ladies, dressed her in flowing silks, and so passed her through the gate
of the enclosure interdicted to bare feet. There they led her to groups
of fashionable ladies, and got themselves into pretty scrapes. They said
she was an Indian. Heriot lost his wagers and called her a witch. She
replied, ‘You’ll find I’m one, young man,’ and that was the only true
thing she spoke of the days to come. Owing to the hubbub around the two
who were guilty of this unmeasured joke upon consequential ladies, I
had to conduct her to the gate. Instantly, and without a good-bye, she
scrambled up her skirts and ran at strides across the road and through
the wood, out of sight. She won her dress and a piece of jewelry.

With Heriot I went on a sad expedition, the same I had set out upon with
Temple. This time I saw my father behind those high red walls, once so
mysterious and terrible to me. Heriot made light of prisons for debt.
He insisted, for my consolation, that they had but a temporary
dishonourable signification; very estimable gentlemen, as well
as scamps, inhabited them, he said. The impression produced by my
visit--the feasting among ruined men who believed in good luck the
more the lower they fell from it, and their fearful admiration of my
imprisoned father--was as if I had drunk a stupefying liquor. I was
unable clearly to reflect on it. Daily afterwards, until I released him,
I made journeys to usurers to get a loan on the faith of the reversion
of my mother’s estate. Heriot, like the real friend he was, helped me
with his name to the bond. When my father stood free, I had the proudest
heart alive; and as soon as we had parted, the most amazed. For a long
while, for years, the thought of him was haunted by racketballs and
bearded men in their shirtsleeves; a scene sickening to one’s pride.
Yet it had grown impossible for me to think of him without pride.
I delighted to hear him. We were happy when we were together. And,
moreover, he swore to me on his honour, in Mrs. Waddy’s presence, that
he and the constable would henceforth keep an even pace. His exuberant
cheerfulness and charming playfulness were always fascinating. His
visions of our glorious future enchained me. How it was that something
precious had gone out of my life, I could not comprehend.

Julia Rippenger’s marriage with Captain Bulsted was, an agreeable
distraction. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she went to the altar
poignantly pale. My aunt Dorothy settled the match. She had schemed it,
her silence and half-downcast look seemed to confess, for the sake of
her own repose, but neither to her nor to others did that come of it.
I wrote a plain warning of the approaching catastrophe to Heriot, and
received his reply after it was over, to this effect:

‘In my regiment we have a tolerable knowledge of women. They like
change, old Richie, and we must be content to let them take their twenty
shillings for a sovereign. I myself prefer the Navy to the Army; I
have no right to complain. Once she swore one thing, now she has sworn
another. We will hope the lady will stick to her choice, and not seek
smaller change. “I could not forgive coppers”; that ‘s quoting your dad.
I have no wish to see the uxorious object, though you praise him. His
habit of falling under the table is middling old-fashioned; but she may
like him the better, or she may cure him. Whatever she is as a woman,
she was a very nice girl to enliven the atmosphere of the switch. I
sometimes look at a portrait I have of J. R., which, I fancy, Mrs.
William Bulsted has no right to demand of me; but supposing her husband
thinks he has, why then I must consult my brother officers. We want
a war, old Richie, and I wish you were sitting at our mess, and not
mooning about girls and women.’

I presumed from this that Heriot’s passion for Julia was extinct. Aunt
Dorothy disapproved of his tone, which I thought admirably philosophical
and coxcombi-cally imitable, an expression of the sort of thing I should
feel on hearing of Janet Ilchester’s nuptials.

The daring and success of that foreign adventure of mine had, with the
aid of Colonel and Clara Goodwin, convinced the squire of the folly of
standing between me and him I loved. It was considered the best sign
possible that he should take me down on an inspection of his various
estates and his great coal-mine, and introduce me as the heir who would
soon relieve him of the task.

Perhaps he thought the smell of wealth a promising cure for such fits
of insubordination as I had exhibited. My occasional absences on my own
account were winked at. On my return the squire was sour and snappish, I
cheerful and complaisant; I grew cold, and he solicitous; he would drink
my health with a challenge to heartiness, and I drank to him heartily
and he relapsed to a fit of sulks, informing me, that in his time young
men knew when they were well off, and asking me whether I was up to any
young men’s villanies, had any concealed debts perchance, because, if
so--Oh! he knew the ways of youngsters, especially when they fell into
bad hands: the list of bad titles rumbled on in an underbreath like
cowardly thunder:--well, to cut the matter short, because, if so,
his cheque-book was at my service; didn’t I know that, eh? Not being
immediately distressed by debt, I did not exhibit the gush of gratitude,
and my sedate ‘Thank you, sir,’ confused his appeal for some sentimental
show of affection.

I am sure the poor old man suffered pangs of jealousy; I could even at
times see into his breast and pity him. He wanted little more than to
be managed; but a youth when he perceives absurdity in opposition to him
chafes at it as much as if he were unaware that it is laughable. Had the
squire talked to me in those days seriously and fairly of my father’s
character, I should have abandoned my system of defence to plead for
him as before a judge. By that time I had gained the knowledge that my
father was totally of a different construction from other men. I wished
the squire to own simply to his loveable nature. I could have told him
women did. Without citing my dear aunt Dorothy, or so humble a creature
as the devoted Mrs. Waddy, he had sincere friends among women, who
esteemed him, and were staunch adherents to his cause; and if the widow
of the City knight, Lady Sampleman, aimed openly at being something
more, she was not the less his friend. Nor was it only his powerful
animation, generosity, and grace that won them.

There occurred when I was a little past twenty, already much in
his confidence, one of those strange crucial events which try a man
publicly, and bring out whatever can be said for and against him. A
young Welsh heiress fell in love with him. She was, I think, seven or
eight months younger than myself, a handsome, intelligent, high-spirited
girl, rather wanting in polish, and perhaps in the protecting sense of
decorum. She was well-born, of course--she was Welsh. She was really
well-bred too, though somewhat brusque. The young lady fell hopelessly
in love with my father at Bath. She gave out that he was not to be for
one moment accused of having encouraged her by secret addresses. It
was her unsolicited avowal--thought by my aunt Dorothy immodest, not by
me--that she preferred him to all living men. Her name was Anna Penrhys.
The squire one morning received a letter from her family, requesting him
to furnish them with information as to the antecedents of a gentleman
calling himself Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph
Roy, for purposes which would, they assured him, warrant the inquiry. He
was for throwing the letter aside, shouting that he thanked his God he
was unacquainted with anybody on earth with such an infernal list of
names as that. Roy! Who knew anything of Roy?

‘It happens to be my father’s present name,’ said I.

‘It sounds to me like the name of one of those blackguard adventurers
who creep into families to catch the fools,’ pursued the squire, not
hearing me with his eyes.

‘The letter at least must be answered,’ my aunt Dorothy said.

‘It shall be answered!’ the squire worked himself up to roar. He wrote a
reply, the contents of which I could guess at from my aunt’s refusal
to let me be present at the discussion of it. The letter despatched was
written by her, with his signature. Her eyes glittered for a whole day.

Then came a statement of the young lady’s case from Bath.

‘Look at that! look at that!’ cried the squire, and went on, ‘Look at
that!’ in a muffled way. There was a touch of dignity in his unforced
anger.

My aunt winced displeasingly to my sight: ‘I see nothing to astonish
one.’

‘Nothing to astonish one!’ The squire set his mouth in imitation of her.

‘You see nothing to astonish one? Well, ma’am, when a man grows old
enough to be a grandfather, I do see something astonishing in a child
of nineteen--by George! it’s out o’ nature. But you women like
monstrosities. Oh! I understand. Here’s an heiress to fifteen thousand a
year. It’s not astonishing if every ruined gambler and scapegrace in the
kingdom’s hunting her hot! no, no! that’s not astonishing. I suppose she
has her money in a coal mine.’

The squire had some of his in a coal-mine; my mother once had; it was
the delivery of a blow at my father, signifying that he had the scent
for this description of wealth. I left the room. The squire then
affected that my presence had constrained him, by bellowing out epithets
easy for me to hear in the hall and out on the terrace. He vowed by
solemn oath he was determined to save this girl from ruin. My aunt’s
speech was brief.

I was summoned to Bath by my father in a curious peremptory tone
implying the utmost urgent need of me.

I handed the letter to the squire at breakfast, saying, ‘You must spare
me for a week or so, sir.’

He spread the letter flat with his knife, and turned it over with his
fork.

‘Harry,’ said he, half-kindly, and choking, ‘you’re better out of it.’

‘I’m the best friend he could have by him, sir.’

‘You’re the best tool he could have handy, for you’re a gentleman.’

‘I hope I shan’t offend you, grandfather, but I must go.’

‘Don’t you see, Harry Richmond, you’re in for an infernal marriage
ceremony there!’

‘The young lady is not of age,’ interposed my aunt.

‘Eh? An infernal elopement, then. It’s clear the girl’s mad-head’s
cracked as a cocoa-nut bowled by a monkey, brains nowhere. Harry, you’re
not a greenhorn; you don’t suspect you’re called down there to stop it,
do you? You jump plump into a furious lot of the girl’s relatives; you
might as well take a header into a leech-pond. Come! you’re a man; think
for yourself. Don’t have this affair on your conscience, boy. I tell
you, Harry Richmond, I’m against your going. You go against my will; you
offend me, sir; you drag my name and blood into the mire. She’s Welsh,
is she? Those Welsh are addle-pated, every one. Poor girl!’

He threw a horrible tremour into his accent of pity.

My aunt expressed her view mildly, that I was sent for to help cure the
young lady of her delusion.

‘And take her himself!’ cried the squire. ‘Harry, you wouldn’t go and do
that? Why, the law, man, the law--the whole country ‘d be up about it.
You’ll be stuck in a coloured caricature!’

He was really alarmed lest this should be one of the consequences of my
going, and described some of the scourging caricatures of his day with
an intense appreciation of their awfulness as engines of the moral sense
of the public. I went nevertheless.



CHAPTER XXI. A PROMENADE IN BATH

I found my father at his hotel, sitting with his friend Jorian DeWitt,
whom I had met once before, and thought clever. He was an ex-captain of
dragoons, a martyr to gout, and addicted to Burgundy, which necessitated
his resorting to the waters, causing him, as he said, between his
appetites and the penance he paid for them, to lead the life of a
pendulum. My father was in a tempered gay mood, examining a couple of
the county newspapers. One abused him virulently; he was supported by
the other. After embracing me, he desired me to listen while he read out
opposing sentences from the columns of these eminent journals:

‘The person calling himself “Roy,” whose monstrously absurd pretensions
are supposed to be embodied in this self-dubbed surname...’

‘--The celebrated and courtly Mr. Richmond Roy, known no less by the
fascination of his manners than by his romantic history...’

‘--has very soon succeeded in making himself the talk of the town...’

‘--has latterly become the theme of our tea-tables...’

‘--which is always the adventurer’s privilege...’

‘--through no fault of his own...’

‘--That we may throw light on the blushing aspirations of a crow-sconced
Cupid, it will be as well to recall the antecedents of this (if no
worse) preposterous imitation buck of the old school...’

‘--Suffice it, without seeking to draw the veil from those affecting
chapters of his earlier career which kindled for him the enthusiastic
sympathy of all classes of his countrymen, that he is not yet free from
a tender form of persecution...’

‘--We think we are justified in entitling him the Perkin Warbeck of
society...’

‘--Reference might be made to mythological heroes...’

Hereat I cried out mercy.

Captain DeWitt (stretched nursing a leg) removed his silk handkerchief
from his face to murmur,

‘The bass stedfastly drowns the treble, if this is meant for harmony.’

My father rang up the landlord, and said to him,

‘The choicest of your cellar at dinner to-day, Mr. Lumley; and, mind
you, I am your guest, and I exercise my right of compelling you to sit
down with us and assist in consuming a doubtful quality of wine. We dine
four. Lay for five, if your conscience is bad, and I excuse you.’

The man smirked. He ventured to say he had never been so tempted to
supply an inferior article.

My father smiled on him.

‘You invite our editorial advocate?’ said Captain DeWitt.

‘Our adversary,’ said my father.

I protested I would not sit at table with him. But he assured me he
believed his advocate and his adversary to be one and the same, and
referred me to the collated sentences.

‘The man must earn his bread, Richie, boy! To tell truth, it is the
advocate I wish to rebuke, and to praise the adversary. It will confound
him.’

‘It does me,’ said DeWitt.

‘You perceive, Jorian, a policy in dining these men of the Press now and
occasionally, considering their growing power, do you not?’

‘Ay, ay! it’s a great gossiping machine, mon Roy. I prefer to let it
spout.’

‘I crave your permission to invite him in complimentary terms, cousin
Jorian. He is in the town; remember, it is for the good of the nation
that he and his like should have the opportunity of studying good
society. As to myself personally, I give him carte blanche to fire his
shots at me.’

Near the fashionable hour of the afternoon my father took my arm,
Captain DeWitt a stick, and we walked into the throng and buzz.

‘Whenever you are, to quote our advocate, the theme of tea-tables,
Richie,’ said my father, ‘walk through the crowd: it will wash you. It
is doing us the honour to observe us. We in turn discover an interest in
its general countenance.’

He was received, as we passed, with much staring; here and there a
lifting of hats, and some blunt nodding that incensed me, but he,
feeling me bristle, squeezed my hand and talked of the scene, and ever
and anon gathered a line of heads and shed an indulgent bow along them-;
so on to the Casino. Not once did he offend my taste and make my acute
sense of self-respect shiver by appearing grateful for a recognition, or
anxious to court it, though the curtest salute met his acknowledgement.

The interior of the Casino seemed more hostile. I remarked it to him. ‘A
trifle more eye-glassy,’ he murmured. He was quite at his easy there.

‘We walk up and down, my son,’ he said, in answer to a question of mine,
‘because there are very few who can; even walking is an art; and if
nobody does, the place is dull.’

‘The place is pretty well supplied with newspapers,’ said Captain
DeWitt.

‘And dowagers, friend Jorian. They are cousins. ‘Tis the fashion to have
our tattle done by machinery. They have their opportunity to compare
the portrait with the original. Come, invent some scandal for us; let
us make this place our social Exchange. I warrant a good bold piece of
invention will fit them, too, some of them. Madam,’--my father bowed
low to the beckoning of a fan, ‘I trust your ladyship did not chance to
overhear that last remark I made?’

The lady replied: ‘I should have shut my eyes if I had. I called you to
tell me, who is the young man?’

‘For twenty years I have lived in the proud belief that he is my son!’

‘I would not disturb it for the world.’ She did me the honour to inspect
me from the lowest waistcoat button to the eyebrows. ‘Bring him to me
to-night. Captain DeWitt, you have forsaken my whist-tables.’

‘Purely temporary fits of unworthiness, my lady.’

‘In English, gout?’

‘Not gout in the conscience, I trust,’ said my father.

‘Oh! that’s curable,’ laughed the captain.

‘You men of repartee would be nothing without your wickedness,’ the lady
observed.

‘Man was supposed to be incomplete--’ Captain DeWitt affected a murmur.

She nodded ‘Yes, yes,’ and lifted eyes on my father. ‘So you have not
given up going to church?’

He bent and spoke low.

She humphed her lips. ‘Very well, I will see. It must be a night in
the early part of the week after next, then: I really don’t know why I
should serve you; but I like your courage.’

‘I cannot consent to accept your ladyship’s favour on account of one
single virtue,’ said he, drooping.

She waved him to move forward.

During this frothy dialogue, I could see that the ear of the assembly
had been caught by the sound of it.

‘That,’ my father informed me, ‘is the great Lady Wilts. Now you will
notice a curious thing. Lady Wilts is not so old but that, as our Jorian
here says of her, she is marriageable. Hence, Richie, she is a queen to
make the masculine knee knock the ground. I fear the same is not to be
said of her rival, Lady Denewdney, whom our good Jorian compares to
an antiquated fledgeling emerging with effort from a nest of ill
construction and worse cement. She is rich, she is sharp, she uses her
quill; she is emphatically not marriageable. Bath might still accept her
as a rival queen, only she is always behindhand in seizing an occasion.
Now you will catch sight of her fan working in a minute. She is envious
and imitative. It would be undoubtedly better policy on her part
to continue to cut me: she cannot, she is beginning to rustle like
December’s oaks. If Lady Wilts has me, why, she must. We refrain from
noticing her until we have turned twice. Ay, Richie, there is this use
in adversity; it teaches one to play sword and target with etiquette and
retenue better than any crowned king in Europe. For me now to cross to
her summons immediately would be a gross breach of homage to Lady Wilts,
who was inspired to be the first to break through the fence of scandal
environing me. But I must still show that I am independent. These people
must not suppose that I have to cling to a party. Let them take sides;
I am on fair terms with both the rivals. I show just such a nuance of a
distinction in my treatment of them just such--enough, I mean, to
make the flattered one warm to me, and t’ other be jealous of her. Ay,
Richie, these things are trivial things beyond the grave; but here are
we, my boy; and, by the way, I suspect the great campaign of my life is
opening.’

Captain DeWitt said that if so it would be the tenth, to his certain
knowledge.

‘Not great campaign!’ my father insisted: ‘mere skirmishes before this.’

They conversed in humorous undertones, each in turn seeming to turn over
the earth of some amusing reminiscence, so rapt, that as far as regarded
their perception of it, the assembly might have been nowhere. Perhaps,
consequently, they became observed with all but undivided attention.
My father’s hand was on my shoulder, his head toward Captain DeWitt;
instead of subduing his voice, he gave it a moderate pitch, at which it
was not intrusive, and was musical, to my ear charming, especially when
he continued talking through his soft laughter, like a hunter that would
in good humour press for his game through links of water-nymphs.

Lady Denewdney’s fan took to beating time meditatively. Two or
three times she kept it elevated, and in vain: the flow of their
interchangeing speech was uninterrupted. At last my father bowed to
her from a distance. She signalled: his eyelids pleaded short sight,
awakening to the apprehension of a pleasant fact: the fan tapped, and he
halted his march, leaning scarce perceptibly in her direction. The fan
showed distress. Thereupon, his voice subsided in his conversation, with
a concluding flash of animation across his features, like a brook that
comes to the leap on a descent, and he left us.

Captain DeWitt and I were led by a common attraction to the portico,
the truth being that we neither of us could pace easily nor talk with
perfect abandonment under eye-fire any longer.

‘Look,’ said he to me, pointing at the equipages and equestrians:
‘you’ll see a sight like this in dozens--dozens of our cities and towns!
The wealth of this country is frightful.’

My reply, addressed at the same time mentally to Temple at sea, was:

‘Well, as long as we have the handsomest women, I don’t care.’

Captain DeWitt was not so sure that we had. The Provencal women, the
women of a part of South Germany, and certain favoured spots of Italy,
might challenge us, he thought. This was a point I could argue on, or,
I should rather say, take up the cudgels, for I deemed such opinions
treason to one’s country and an outrage to common sense, and I embarked
in controversy with the single-minded intention of knocking down the man
who held them.

He accepted his thrashing complacently.

‘Now here comes a young lady on horseback,’ he said; ‘do you spy her?
dark hair, thick eyebrows, rides well, followed by a groom. Is she a
Beauty?’

In the heat of patriotism I declared she was handsome, and repeated it,
though I experienced a twinge of remorse, like what I should have felt
had I given Minerva the apple instead of Venus.

‘Oh!’ he commented, and stepped down to the road to meet her, beginning,
in my hearing, ‘I am the bearer of a compliment--’ Her thick eyebrows
stood in a knot, then she glanced at me and hung pensive. She had not to
wait a minute before my father came to her side.

‘I knew you would face them,’ she said.

He threw back his head like a swimmer tossing spray from his locks.

‘You have read the paper?’ he asked.

‘You have horsewhipped the writer?’ she rejoined.

‘Oh! the poor penster!’

‘Nay, we can’t pretend to pity him!’

‘Could we condescend to offer him satisfaction?’

‘Would he dare to demand it?’

‘We will lay the case before Lady Wilts to-night.’

‘You are there to-night?’

‘At Lady Denewdney’s to-morrow night--if I may indulge a hope?’

‘Both? Oh! bravo, bravo! Tell me nothing more just now. How did you
manage it? I must have a gallop. Yes, I shall be at both, be sure of
that.’

My father introduced me.

‘Let me present to your notice my son, Harry Lepel Richmond, Miss
Penrhys.’

She touched my fingers, and nodded at me; speaking to him:

‘He has a boy’s taste: I hear he esteems me moderately well-favoured.’

‘An inherited error certain to increase with age!’

‘Now you have started me!’ she exclaimed, and lashed the flanks of her
horse.

We had evidently been enacting a part deeply interesting to the
population of Bath, for the heads of all the strolling groups were bent
on us; and when Miss Penrhys cantered away, down dropped eyeglasses, and
the promenade returned to activity. I fancied I perceived that my father
was greeted more cordially on his way back to the hotel.

‘You do well, Richie,’ he observed, ‘in preserving your composure until
you have something to say. Wait for your opening; it will come, and the
right word will come with it. The main things are to be able to stand
well, walk well, and look with an eye at home in its socket: I put you
my hand on any man or woman born of high blood.--Not a brazen eye!--of
the two extremes, I prefer the beaten spaniel sort.--Blindfold me, but
I put you my hand on them. As to repartee, you must have it. Wait for
that, too. Do not,’ he groaned, ‘do not force it! Bless my soul, what is
there in the world so bad?’ And rising to the upper notes of his groan:
‘Ignorance, density, total imbecility, is better; I would rather any
day of my life sit and carve for guests--the grossest of human trials--a
detestable dinner, than be doomed to hear some wretched fellow--and you
hear the old as well as the young--excruciate feelings which, where they
exist, cannot but be exquisitely delicate. Goodness gracious me! to
see the man pumping up his wit! For me, my visage is of an unalterable
gravity whenever I am present at one of these exhibitions. I care not
if I offend. Let them say I wish to revolutionize society--I declare to
you, Richie boy, delightful to my heart though I find your keen stroke
of repartee, still your fellow who takes the thrust gracefully, knows
when he’s traversed by a master-stroke, and yields sign of it,
instead of plunging like a spitted buffalo and asking us to admire his
agility--you follow me?--I say I hold that man--and I delight vastly
in ready wit; it is the wine of language!--I regard that man as the
superior being. True, he is not so entertaining.’

My father pressed on my arm to intimate, with a cavernous significance
of eyebrow, that Captain DeWitt had the gift of repartee in perfection.

‘Jorian,’ said he, ‘will you wager our editor declines to dine with us?’

The answer struck me as only passable. I think it was:

‘When rats smell death in toasted cheese.’

Captain DeWitt sprang up the staircase of our hotel to his bedroom.

‘I should not have forced him,’ my father mused. ‘Jorian DeWitt has at
times brilliant genius, Richie--in the way of rejoinders, I mean. This
is his happy moment--his one hour’s dressing for dinner. I have watched
him; he most thoroughly enjoys it! I am myself a quick or slow dresser,
as the case may be. But to watch Jorian you cannot help entering into
his enjoyment of it. He will have his window with a view of the sunset;
there is his fire, his warmed linen, and his shirt-studs; his bath, his
choice of a dozen things he will or will not wear; the landlord’s or
host’s menu is up against the looking-glass, and the extremely handsome
miniature likeness of his wife, who is in the madhouse, by a celebrated
painter, I forget his name. Jorian calls this, new birth--you catch his
idea? He throws off the old and is on with the new with a highly hopeful
anticipation. His valet is a scoundrel, but never fails in extracting
the menu from the cook, wherever he may be, and, in fine, is too
attentive to the hour’s devotion to be discarded! Poor Jorian. I know no
man I pity so much.’

I conceived him, I confessed, hardly pitiable, though not enviable.

‘He has but six hundred a year, and a passion for Burgundy,’ said my
father.

We were four at table. The editor came, and his timidity soon wore off
in the warmth of hospitality. He appeared a kind exciteable little
man, glad of his dinner from the first, and in due time proud of his
entertainer. His response to the toast of the Fourth Estate was an
apology for its behaviour to my father. He regretted it; he regretted
it. A vinous speech.

My father heard him out. Addressing him subsequently,

‘I would not interrupt you in the delivery of your sentiments,’ he said.
‘I must, however, man to man, candidly tell you I should have wished to
arrest your expressions of regret. They convey to my mind an idea, that
on receipt of my letter of invitation, you attributed to me a design to
corrupt you. Protest nothing, I beg. Editors are human, after all. Now,
my object is, that as you write of me, you should have some knowledge of
me; and I naturally am interested in one who does me so much honour.
The facts of my life are at your disposal for publication and comment.
Simply, I entreat you, say this one thing of me: I seek for justice, but
I never complain of my fortunes. Providence decides:--that might be the
motto engraven on my heart. Nay, I may risk declaring it is! In the
end I shall be righted. Meanwhile you contribute to my happiness by
favouring me with your society.’

‘Ah, sir,’ replied the little man, ‘were all our great people like you!
In the country--the provinces--they treat the representatives of the
Fourth Estate as the squires a couple of generations back used to treat
the parsons.’

‘What! Have you got a place at their tables?’ inquired Captain DeWitt.

‘No, I cannot say that--not even below the salt. Mr. Richmond--Mr.
Roy, you may not be aware of it: I am the proprietor of the opposition
journals in this county. I tell you in confidence, one by itself would
not pay; and I am a printer, sir, and it is on my conscience to tell you
I have, in the course of business, been compelled this very morning
to receive orders for the printing of various squibs and, I much fear,
scurrilous things.’

My father pacified him.

‘You will do your duty to your family, Mr. Hickson.’

Deeply moved, the little man pulled out proof-sheets and slips.

‘Even now, at the eleventh hour,’ he urged, ‘there is time to correct
any glaring falsehoods, insults, what not!’

My father accepted the copy of proofs.

‘Not a word,--not a line! You spoke of the eleventh hour, Mr. Hickson.
If we are at all near the eleventh, I must be on my way to make my bow
to Lady Wilts; or is it Lady Denewdney’s to-night? No, to-morrow night.’

A light of satisfaction came over Mr. Hickson’s face at the mention of
my father’s visiting both these sovereign ladies.

As soon as we were rid of him, Captain DeWitt exclaimed,

‘If that’s the Fourth Estate, what’s the Realm?’

‘The Estate,’ pleaded my father, ‘is here in its infancy--on all
fours--’

‘Prehensile! Egad, it has the vices of the other three besides its own.
Do you mean that by putting it on all fours?’

‘Jorian, I have noticed that when you are malignant you are not witty.
We have to thank the man for not subjecting us to a pledge of secresy.
My Lady Wilts will find the proofs amusing. And mark, I do not examine
their contents before submitting them to her inspection. You will
testify to the fact.’

I was unaware that my father played a master-stroke in handing these
proof-sheets publicly to Lady Wilts for her perusal. The incident of
the evening was the display of her character shown by Miss Penrhys in
positively declining to quit the house until she likewise had cast her
eye on them. One of her aunts wept. Their carriage was kept waiting an
hour.

‘You ask too much of me: I cannot turn her out’, Lady Wilts said to her
uncle. And aside to my father, ‘You will have to marry her.’

‘In heaven’s name keep me from marriage, my lady!’ I heard him reply.

There was sincerity in his tone when he said that.



CHAPTER XXII. CONCLUSION OF THE BATH EPISODE

The friends of Miss Penrhys were ill advised in trying to cry down a man
like my father. Active persecution was the breath of life to him. When
untroubled he was apt to let both his ambition and his dignity slumber.
The squibs and scandal set afloat concerning him armed his wit, nerved
his temper, touched him with the spirit of enterprise; he became a new
creature. I lost sight of certain characteristics which I had begun to
ponder over critically. I believed with all my heart that circumstances
were blameable for much that did not quite please me. Upon the question
of his magnanimity, as well as of his courage, there could not be two
opinions. He would neither retort nor defend himself. I perceived some
grandeur in his conduct, without, however, appreciating it cordially, as
I did a refinement of discretion about him that kept him from brushing
good taste while launched in ostentatious displays. He had a fine tact
and a keen intuition. He may have thought it necessary to throw a little
dust in my eyes; but I doubt his having done it, for he had only, as
he knew, to make me jealous to blind me to his faults utterly, and he
refrained.

In his allusions to the young lady he was apologetic, affectionate; one
might have fancied oneself listening to a gracious judge who had well
weighed her case, and exculpated her from other excesses than that of
a generous folly. Jorian DeWitt, a competent critic, pronounced his
behaviour consummate at all points. For my behoof, he hinted antecedent
reverses to the picture: meditating upon which, I traced them to the
fatal want of money, and that I might be able to fortify him in case
of need, I took my own counsel, and wrote to my aunt for the loan of as
large a sum as she could afford to send. Her eagerness for news of
our doings was insatiable. ‘You do not describe her,’ she replied,
not naming Miss Penrhys; and again, ‘I can form no image of her. Your
accounts of her are confusing. Tell me earnestly, do you like her? She
must be very wilful, but is she really nice? I want to know how she
appears to my Harry’s mind.’

My father borrowed these letters, and returning them to me, said, ‘A
good soul! the best of women! There--there is a treasure lost!’ His
forehead was clouded in speaking. He recommended me to assure my aunt
that she would never have to take a family interest in Miss Penrhys. But
this was not deemed perfectly satisfactory at Riversley. My aunt wrote:
‘Am I to understand that you, Harry, raise objections to her? Think
first whether she is in herself objectionable. She is rich, she may
be prudent, she may be a forethoughtful person. She may not be able to
support a bitter shock of grief. She may be one who can help. She may
not be one whose heart will bear it. Put your own feelings aside,
my dearest. Our duties cannot ever be clear to us until we do. It is
possible for headstrong wilfulness and secret tenderness to go together.
Think whether she is capable of sacrifice before you compel her to it.
Do not inflict misery wantonly. One would like to see her. Harry, I
brood on your future; that is why I seem to you preternaturally anxious
about you.’

She seemed to me preternaturally anxious about Miss Penrhys.

My father listened in silence to my flippant satire on women’s letters.

He answered after a pause,

‘Our Jorian says that women’s letters must be read like anagrams. To put
it familiarly, they are like a child’s field of hop-scotch. You may
have noticed the urchins at their game: a bit of tile, and a variety
of compartments to pass it through to the base, hopping. Or no, Richie,
pooh! ‘tis an unworthy comparison, this hopscotch. I mean, laddie, they
write in zigzags; and so will you when your heart trumpets in your ear.
Tell her, tell that dear noble good woman--say, we are happy, you and
I, and alone, and shall be; and do me the favour--she loves you, my
son--address her sometimes--she has been it--call her “mother”; she will
like it she deserves--nothing shall supplant her!’

He lost his voice.

She sent me three hundred pounds; she must have supposed the occasion
pressing. Thus fortified against paternal improvidence, I expended a
hundred in the purchase of a horse, and staked the remainder on him in a
match, and was beaten. Disgusted with the horse, I sold him for half his
purchase-money, and with that sum paid a bill to maintain my father’s
credit in the town. Figuratively speaking, I looked at my hands as
astonished as I had been when the poor little rascal in the street
snatched my cake, and gave me the vision of him gorging it in the
flurried alley of the London crowd.

‘Money goes,’ I remarked.

‘That is the general experience of the nature of money,’ said my
father freshly; ‘but nevertheless you will be surprised to find how
extraordinarily few are the people to make allowance for particular
cases. It plays the trick with everybody, and almost nobody lets it
stand as a plea for the individual. Here is Jorian, and you, my son, and
perhaps your aunt Dorothy, and upon my word, I think I have numbered all
I know--or, ay, Sukey Sampleman, I should not omit her in an honourable
list--and that makes positively all I know who would commiserate a
man touched on the shoulder by a sheriff’s officer--not that such an
indignity is any longer done to me.’

‘I hope we have seen the last of Shylock’s great-grandnephew,’ said I
emphatically.

‘Merely to give you the instance, Richie. Ay! I hope so, I hope so!
But it is the nature of money that you never can tell if the boarding’s
sound, once be dependent upon it. But this is talk for tradesmen.’
Thinking it so myself, I had not attempted to discover the source of
my father’s income. Such as it was, it was paid half-yearly, and spent
within a month of the receipt, for the most signal proof possible of its
shameful insufficiency. Thus ten months of the year at least he lived
protesting, and many with him, compulsorily. For two months he was
a brilliant man. I penetrated his mystery enough to abstain from
questioning him, and enough to determine that on my coming of age he
should cease to be a pensioner, petitioner, and adventurer. He aimed at
a manifest absurdity.

In the meantime, after the lesson I had received as to the nature of
money, I saw with some alarm my father preparing to dig a great pit for
it. He had no doubt performed wonders. Despite of scandal and tattle,
and the deadly report of a penniless fortune-hunter having fascinated
the young heiress, he commanded an entrance to the receptions of both
the rival ladies dominant. These ladies, Lady Wilts and Lady Denewdney,
who moved each in her select half-circle, and could heretofore be
induced by none to meet in a common centre, had pledged themselves to
honour with their presence a ball he proposed to give to the choice
world here assembled on a certain illuminated day of the calendar.

‘So I have now possession of Bath, Richie,’ said he, twinkling to
propitiate me, lest I should suspect him of valuing his achievements
highly. He had, he continued, promised Hickson of the Fourth Estate,
that he would, before leaving the place, do his utmost to revive the
ancient glories of Bath: Bath had once set the fashion to the kingdom;
why not again? I might have asked him, why at all, or why at his
expense; but his lead was irresistible. Captain DeWitt and his valet,
and I, and a score of ladies, scores of tradesmen, were rushing,
reluctant or not, on a torrent. My part was to show that I was an
athlete, and primarily that I could fence and shoot. ‘It will do no harm
to let it be known,’ said DeWitt. He sat writing letters incessantly. My
father made the tour of his fair stewardesses from noon to three,
after receiving in audience his jewellers, linen-drapers, carpenters,
confectioners, from nine in the morning till twelve. At three o’clock
business ceased. Workmen then applying to him for instructions were
despatched to the bar of the hotel, bearing the recommendation to the
barmaid not to supply them refreshment if they had ever in their lives
been seen drunk. At four he dressed for afternoon parade. Nor could his
enemy have said that he was not the chief voice and eye along his
line of march. His tall full figure maintained a superior air without
insolence, and there was a leaping beam in his large blue eyes, together
with the signification of movement coming to his kindly lips, such as
hardly ever failed to waken smiles of greeting. People smiled and bowed,
and forgot their curiosity, forgot even to be critical, while he was in
sight. I can say this, for I was acutely critical of their bearing; the
atmosphere of the place was never perfectly pleasing to me.

My attitude of watchful reserve, and my reputation as the heir of
immense wealth, tended possibly to constrain a certain number of the
inimical party to be ostensibly civil. Lady Wilts, who did me the honour
to patronize me almost warmly, complimented me on my manner of backing
him, as if I were the hero; but I felt his peculiar charm; she partly
admitted it, making a whimsical mouth, saying, in allusion to Miss
Penrhys, ‘I, you know, am past twenty. At twenty forty is charming; at
forty twenty.’

Where I served him perhaps was in showing my resolution to protect
him: he had been insulted before my arrival. The male relatives of Miss
Penrhys did not repeat the insult; they went to Lady Wilts and groaned
over their hard luck in not having the option of fighting me. I was, in
her phrase, a new piece on the board, and checked them. Thus, if they
provoked a challenge from me, they brought the destructive odour of
powder about the headstrong creature’s name. I was therefore of use to
him so far. I leaned indolently across the rails of the promenade while
she bent and chattered in his ear, and her attendant cousin and cavalier
chewed vexation in the form of a young mustachio’s curl. His horse
fretted; he murmured deep notes, and his look was savage; but he was
bound to wait on her, and she would not go until it suited her pleasure.
She introduced him to me--as if conversation could be carried on between
two young men feeling themselves simply pieces on the board, one giving
check, and the other chafing under it! I need not say that I disliked
my situation. It was worse when my father took to bowing to her from a
distance, unobservant of her hand’s prompt pull at the reins as soon
as she saw him. Lady Wilts had assumed the right of a woman still
possessing attractions to exert her influence with him on behalf of the
family, for I had done my best to convince her that he entertained no
serious thought of marrying, and decidedly would not marry without my
approval. He acted on her advice to discourage the wilful girl.

‘How is it I am so hateful to you?’ Miss Penrhys accosted me abruptly.
I fancied she must have gone mad, and an interrogative frown was my sole
answer.

‘Oh! I hear that you pronounce me everywhere unendurable,’ she
continued. ‘You are young, and you misjudge me in some way, and I should
be glad if you knew me better. By-and-by, in Wales.--Are you fond of
mountain scenery? We might be good friends; my temper is not bad--at
least, I hope not. Heaven knows what one’s relatives think of one. Will
you visit us? I hear you have promised your confidante, Lady Wilts.’

At a dancing party where we met, she was thrown on my hands by her
ungovernable vehemence, and I, as I had told Lady Wilts, not being able
to understand the liking of twenty for forty (fifty would have been
nearer the actual mark, or sixty), offered her no lively sympathy.
I believe she had requested my father to pay public court to her. If
Captain DeWitt was to be trusted, she desired him to dance, and dance
with her exclusively, and so confirm and defy the tattle of the town;
but my father hovered between the dowagers. She in consequence declined
to dance, which was the next worse thing she could do. An aunt, a
miserable woman, was on her left; on her right she contrived, too
frequently for my peace of mind, to reserve a vacant place for me, and
she eyed me intently across the room, under her persistent brows, until
perforce I was drawn to her side. I had to listen to a repetition of
sharp queries and replies, and affect a flattered gaiety, feeling myself
most uncomfortably, as Captain DeWitt (who watched us) said, Chip the
son of Block the father. By fixing the son beside her, she defeated the
father’s scheme of coldness, and made it appear a concerted piece of
policy. Even I saw that. I saw more than I grasped. Love for my father
was to my mind a natural thing, a proof of taste and goodness; women
might love him; but the love of a young girl with the morning’s mystery
about her! and for my progenitor!--a girl (as I reflected in the midst
of my interjections) well-built, clear-eyed, animated, clever, with soft
white hands and pretty feet; how could it be? She was sombre as a sunken
fire until he at last came round to her, and then her sudden vivacity
was surprising.

Affairs were no further advanced when I had to obey the squire’s
commands and return to Riversley, missing the night of the grand ball
with no profound regret, except for my father’s sake. He wrote soon
after one of his characteristic letters, to tell me that the ball
had, been a success. Immediately upon this announcement, he indulged
luxurious reflections, as his manner was:

‘To have stirred up the old place and given it something to dream of for
the next half century, is a satisfaction, Richie. I have a kindness for
Bath. I leave it with its factions reconciled, its tea-tables furnished
with inexhaustible supplies of the chief thing necessary, and the
persuasion firmly established in my own bosom that it is impossible to
revive the past, so we must march with the age. And let me add, all but
every one of the bills happily discharged, to please you. Pray, fag at
your German. If (as I myself confess to) you have enjoyment of old
ways, habits, customs, and ceremonies, look to Court life. It is only
in Courts that a man may now air a leg; and there the women are works
of Art. If you are deficient in calves (which my boy, thank heaven!
will never be charged with) you are there found out, and in fact every
deficiency, every qualification, is at once in patent exhibition at a
Court. I fancy Parliament for you still, and that is no impediment as a
step. Jorian would have you sit and wallow in ease, and buy (by the way,
we might think of it) a famous Burgundy vineyard (for an investment),
devote the prime of your life to the discovery of a cook, your manhood
to perfect the creature’s education--so forth; I imagine you are to get
five years of ample gratification (a promise hardly to be relied on) in
the sere leaf, and so perish. Take poor Jorian for an example of what
the absence of ambition brings men to. I treasure Jorian, I hoard the
poor fellow, to have him for a lesson to my boy. Witty and shrewd, and a
masterly tactician (I wager he would have won his spurs on the field
of battle), you see him now living for one hour of the day--absolutely
twenty-three hours of the man’s life are chained slaves, beasts of
burden, to the four-and-twentieth! So, I repeat, fag at your German.

‘Miss Penrhys retires to her native Wales; Jorian and I on to London, to
the Continent. Plinlimmon guard us all! I send you our local newspapers.
That I cut entrechats is false. It happens to be a thing I could do, and
not an Englishman in England except myself; only I did not do it. I
did appear in what I was educated to believe was the evening suit of
a gentleman, and I cannot perceive the immodesty of showing my leg. A
dress that is not indecent, and is becoming to me, and is the dress
of my fathers, I wear, and I impose it on the generation of my sex.
However, I dined Hickson of the Fourth Estate (Jorian considers him
hungry enough to eat up his twentieth before he dies--I forget the
wording of the mot), that he might know I was without rancour in the
end, as originally I had been without any intention of purchasing
his allegiance. He offered me his columns; he wished me luck with the
heiress; by his Gods, he swore he worshipped entrechats, and held a
silk leg the most admirable work of the manufactures. “Sir, you’re a
gentleman,” says he; “you’re a nobleman, sir; you ‘re a prince, you ‘re
a star of the first magnitude.” Cries Jorian, “Retract that, scum!
you see nothing large but what you dare to think neighbours you,” and
quarrels the inebriate dog. And this is the maker and destroyer of
reputations in his day! I study Hickson as a miraculous engine of the
very simplest contrivance; he is himself the epitome of a verdict on his
period. Next day he disclaimed in his opposition penny sheet the report
of the entrechats, and “the spectators laughing consumedly,” and sent
me (as I had requested him to do) the names of his daughters, to whom I
transmit little comforting presents, for if they are nice children such
a parent must afflict them.

‘Cultivate Lady Wilts. You have made an impression. She puts you forward
as a good specimen of our young men. ‘Hem! madam.

‘But, my dear boy, as I said, we cannot revive the past. I acknowledge
it. Bath rebukes my last fit of ambition, and the experience is very
well worth the expense. You have a mind, Richie, for discussing
outlay, upon which I congratulate you, so long as you do not overlook
equivalents. The system of the world is barter varied by robbery. Show
that you have something in hand, and you enjoy the satisfaction of
knowing that you were not robbed. I pledge you my word to it--I shall
not repeat Bath. And mark you, an heiress is never compromised. I am
not, I hope, responsible for every creature caught up in my circle of
attraction. Believe me, dear boy, I should consult you, and another one,
estimable beyond mortal speech! if I had become involved--impossible!
No; I am free of all fresh chains, because of the old ones. Years will
not be sufficient for us when you and I once begin to talk in earnest,
when I open! To resume--so I leave Bath with a light conscience. Mixed
with pleasant recollections is the transient regret that you were not
a spectator of the meeting of the Wilts and Denewdney streams. Jorian
compared them to the Rhone and the--I forget the name of the river
below Geneva--dirtyish; for there was a transparent difference in the
Denewdney style of dress, and did I choose it I could sit and rule those
two factions as despotically as Buonaparte his Frenchmen. Ask me what I
mean by scaling billows, Richie. I will some day tell you. I have done
it all my life, and here I am. But I thank heaven I have a son I love,
and I can match him against the best on earth, and henceforward I live
for him, to vindicate and right the boy, and place him in his legitimate
sphere. From this time I take to looking exclusively forward, and I
labour diligently. I have energies.

‘Not to boast, darling old son, I tell truth; I am only happy when
my heart is beating near you. Here comes the mother in me pumping
up. Adieu. Lebe wohl. The German!--the German!--may God in his
Barmherzigkeit!--Tell her I never encouraged the girl, have literally
nothing to trace a temporary wrinkle on my forehead as regards
conscience. I say, may it please Providence to make you a good German
scholar by the day of your majority. Hurrah for it! Present my humble
warm respects to your aunt Dorothy. I pray to heaven nightly for one of
its angels on earth. Kunst, Wissenschaft, Ehre, Liebe. Die Liebe.
Quick at the German poets. Frau: Fraulein. I am actually dazzled at the
prospect of our future. To be candid, I no longer see to write. Gruss’
dich herzlich. From Vienna to you next. Lebe wohl!’

My aunt Dorothy sent a glance at the letter while I was folding it
evidently thinking my unwillingness to offer it a sign of bad news or
fresh complications. She spoke of Miss Penrhys.

‘Oh! that’s over,’ said I. ‘Heiresses soon get consoled.’

She accused me of having picked up a vulgar idea. I maintained that it
was my father’s.

‘It cannot be your father’s,’ said she softly; and on affirming that
he had uttered it and written it, she replied in the same tone, more
effective than the ordinary language of conviction, ‘He does not think
it.’

The rage of a youth to prove himself in the right of an argument was
insufficient to make me lay the letter out before other eyes than my
own, and I shrank from exposing it to compassionate gentle eyes that
would have pleaded similar allowances to mine for the wildness of the
style. I should have thanked, but despised the intelligence of one who
framed my excuses for my father, just as the squire, by abusing him,
would have made me a desperate partisan in a minute. The vitality of the
delusion I cherished was therefore partly extinct; not so the love;
yet the love of him could no longer shake itself free from oppressive
shadows.

Out of his circle of attraction books were my resource.



CHAPTER XXIII. MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY

Books and dreams, like the two rivers cited by my father, flowed side
by side in me without mixing; and which the bright Rhone was, which the
brown Arve, needs not to be told to those who know anything of youth;
they were destined to intermingle soon enough. I read well, for I felt
ground and had mounting views; the real world, and the mind and passions
of the world, grew visible to me. My tutor pleased the squire immensely
by calling me matter-of-fact. In philosophy and history I hated
speculation; but nothing was too fantastic for my ideas of possible
occurrences. Once away from books, I carried a head that shot rockets to
the farthest hills.

My dear friend Temple was at sea, or I should have had one near me to
detect and control the springs of nonsense. I was deemed a remarkably
quiet sober thoughtful young man, acquiescent in all schemes projected
for my welfare. The squire would have liked to see me courting the
girl of his heart, as he termed Janet Ilchester, a little more
demonstratively. We had, however, come to the understanding that I was
to travel before settling. Traditional notions of the importance of the
Grand Tour in the education of gentlemen led him to consent to my taking
a year on the Continent accompanied by my tutor. He wanted some one, he
said, to represent him when I was out over there; which signified that
he wanted some one to keep my father in check; but as the Rev. Ambrose
Peterborough, successor to the Rev. Simon Hart, was hazy and manageable,
I did not object. Such faith had the quiet thoughtful young man
at Riversley in the convulsions of the future, the whirlwinds and
whirlpools spinning for him and all connected with him, that he did not
object to hear his name and Janet’s coupled, though he had not a spark
of love for her.

I tried to realize to myself the general opinion that she was handsome.
Her eyebrows were thick and level and long; her eyes direct in their
gaze, of a flinty blue, with dark lashes; her nose firm, her lips
fullish, firm when joined; her shape straight, moderately flexible.
But she had no softness; she could admire herself in my presence; she
claimed possession of me openly, and at the same time openly provoked
a siege from the remainder of my sex: she was not maidenly. She caught
imagination by the sleeve, and shut it between square whitewashed walls.
Heriot thought her not only handsome, but comparable to Mrs. William
Bulsted, our Julia Rippenger of old. At his meeting with Julia, her
delicious loss of colour made her seem to me one of the loveliest women
on earth. Janet never lost colour, rarely blushed; she touched neither
nerve nor fancy.

‘You want a rousing coquette,’ said Heriot; ‘you won’t be happy till you
‘ve been racked by that nice instrument of torture, and the fair Bulsted
will do it for you if you like. You don’t want a snake or a common
serpent, you want a Python.’

I wanted bloom and mystery, a woman shifting like the light with
evening and night and dawn, and sudden fire. Janet was bald to the heart
inhabiting me then, as if quite shaven. She could speak her affectionate
mind as plain as print, and it was dull print facing me, not the arches
of the sunset. Julia had only to lisp, ‘my husband,’ to startle and
agitate me beyond expression. She said simple things--‘I slept well last
night,’ or ‘I dreamed,’ or ‘I shivered,’ and plunged me headlong down
impenetrable forests. The mould of her mouth to a reluctant ‘No,’ and
her almost invariable drawing in of her breath with a ‘Yes,’ surcharged
the everyday monosyllables with meanings of life and death. At last
I was reduced to tell her, seeing that she reproached my coldness for
Janet, how much I wished Janet resembled her. Her Irish eyes lightened:
‘Me! Harry’; then they shadowed: ‘She is worth ten of me.’ Such pathetic
humility tempted me to exalt her supremely.

I talked like a boy, feeling like a man: she behaved like a woman,
blushing like a girl.

‘Julia! I can never call you Mrs. Bulsted.’

‘You have an affection for my husband, have you not, Harry?’

Of a season when this was adorable language to me, the indication
is sufficient. Riding out perfectly crazed by it, I met Kiomi, and
transferred my emotions. The squire had paid her people an annual sum to
keep away from our neighbourhood, while there was a chance of my taking
to gipsy life. They had come back to their old camping-ground, rather
dissatisfied with the squire.

‘Speak to him yourself, Kiomi,’ said I; ‘whatever you ask for, he can’t
refuse anything to such eyes as yours.’

‘You!’ she rallied me; ‘why can’t you talk sensible stuff!’

She had grown a superb savage, proof against weather and compliments.
Her face was like an Egyptian sky fronting night. The strong old Eastern
blood put ruddy flame for the red colour; tawny olive edged from the
red; rare vivid yellow, all but amber. The light that first looks down
upon the fallen sun was her complexion above the brows, and round the
cheeks, the neck’s nape, the throat, and the firm bosom prompt to
lift and sink with her vigour of speech, as her eyes were to flash and
darken. Meeting her you swore she was the personification of wandering
Asia. There was no question of beauty and grace, for these have laws.
The curve of her brows broke like a beaten wave; the lips and nostrils
were wide, tragic in repose. But when she laughed she illuminated you;
where she stepped she made the earth hers. She was as fresh of her East
as the morning when her ancient people struck tents in the track of
their shadows. I write of her in the style consonant to my ideas of her
at the time. I would have carried her off on the impulse and lived her
life, merely to have had such a picture moving in my sight, and call it
mine.

‘You’re not married?’ I said, ludicrously faintly.

‘I ‘ve not seen the man I’d marry,’ she answered, grinning scorn.

The prizefighter had adopted drinking for his pursuit; one of her aunts
was dead, and she was in quest of money to bury the dead woman with
the conventional ceremonies and shows of respect dear to the hearts
of gipsies, whose sense of propriety and adherence to customs are a
sentiment indulged by them to a degree unknown to the stabled classes.
In fact, they have no other which does not come under the definite title
of pride;--pride in their physical prowess, their dexterity, ingenuity,
and tricksiness, and their purity of blood. Kiomi confessed she had
hoped to meet me; confessed next that she had been waiting to jump out
on me: and next that she had sat in a tree watching the Grange yesterday
for six hours; and all for money to do honour to her dead relative, poor
little soul! Heriot and I joined the decent procession to the grave. Her
people had some quarrel with the Durstan villagers, and she feared the
scandal of being pelted on the way to the church. I knew that nothing
of the sort would happen if I was present. Kiomi walked humbly with her
head bent, leaving me the thick rippling coarse black locks of her
hair for a mark of observation. We were entertained at her camp in the
afternoon. I saw no sign of intelligence between her and Heriot. On my
asking her, the day before, if she remembered him, she said, ‘I do, I’m
dangerous for that young man.’ Heriot’s comment on her was impressed
on me by his choosing to call her ‘a fine doe leopard,’ and maintaining
that it was a defensible phrase.

She was swept from my amorous mind by Mabel Sweetwinter, the miller’s
daughter of Dipwell. This was a Saxon beauty in full bud, yellow as
mid-May, with the eyes of opening June. Beauty, you will say, is easily
painted in that style. But the sort of beauty suits the style, and the
well-worn comparisons express the well-known type. Beside Kiomi she was
like a rich meadow on the border of the heaths.

We saw them together on my twenty-first birthday. To my shame I awoke in
the early morning at Riversley, forgetful of my father’s old appointment
for the great Dipwell feast. Not long after sunrise, when blackbirds
peck the lawns, and swallows are out from under eaves to the flood’s
face, I was hailed by Janet Ilchester beneath my open windows. I knew
she had a bet with the squire that she would be the first to hail me
legal man, and was prepared for it. She sat on horseback alone in the
hazy dewy Midsummer morning, giving clear note:

‘Whoop! Harry Richmond! halloo!’ To which I tossed her a fox’s brush,
having a jewelled bracelet pendant. She missed it and let it lie, and
laughed.

‘No, no; it’s foxie himself!--anybody may have the brush. You’re
dressed, are you, Harry? You were sure I should come? A thousand happy
years to you, and me to see them, if you don’t mind. I ‘m first to wish
it, I’m certain. I was awake at three, out at halfpast, over Durstan
heath, across Eckerthy’s fields--we’ll pay the old man for damage--down
by the plantation, Bran and Sailor at my heels, and here I am. Crow,
cocks! bark, dogs! up, larks! I said I’d be first. And now I ‘m round
to stables to stir up Uberly. Don’t be tardy, Mr. Harry, and we’ll be
Commodore Arson and his crew before the world’s awake.’

We rode out for a couple of hours, and had to knock at a farmhouse for
milk and bread. Possibly a sense of independence, owing to the snatching
of a meal in midflight away from home, made Janet exclaim that she would
gladly be out all day. Such freaks were exceedingly to my taste. Then
I remembered Dipwell, and sure that my father would be there, though
he had not written of it, I proposed to ride over. She pleaded for the
horses and the squire alternately. Feasting was arranged at Riversley,
as well as at Dipwell, and she said musically,

‘Harry, the squire is a very old man, and you may not have many more
chances of pleasing him. To-day do, do! To-morrow, ride to your father,
if you must: of course you must if you think it right; but don’t go this
day.’

‘Not upset my fortune, Janet?’

‘Don’t hurt the kind old man’s heart to-day.’

‘Oh! you’re the girl of his heart, I know.’

‘Well, Harry, you have first place, and I want you to keep it.’

‘But here’s an oath I’ve sworn to my father.’

‘He should not have exacted it, I think.’

‘I promised him when I was a youngster.’

‘Then be wiser now, Harry.’

‘You have brilliant ideas of the sacredness of engagements.’

‘I think I have common sense, that’s all.’

‘This is a matter of feeling.’

‘It seems that you forgot it, though!’

Kiomi’s tents on Durstan heath rose into view. I controlled my verbal
retort upon Janet to lead her up to the gipsy girl, for whom she had an
odd aversion, dating from childhood. Kiomi undertook to ride to Dipwell,
a distance of thirty miles, and carry the message that I would be there
by nightfall. Tears were on Janet’s resolute face as we cantered home.

After breakfast the squire introduced me to his lawyer, Mr. Burgin, who,
closeted alone with me, said formally,

‘Mr. Harry Richmond, you are Squire Beltham’s grandson, his sole male
descendant, and you are established at present, and as far as we
can apprehend for the future, as the direct heir to the whole of his
property, which is enormous now, and likely to increase so long as he
lives. You may not be aware that your grandfather has a most sagacious
eye for business. Had he not been born a rich man he would still have
been one of our very greatest millionaires. He has rarely invested
but to double his capital; never speculated but to succeed. He may not
understand men quite so well, but then he trusts none entirely; so if
there is a chasm in his intelligence, there is a bridge thrown across
it. The metaphor is obscure perhaps: you will doubtless see my meaning.
He knows how to go on his road without being cheated. For himself, your
grandfather, Mr. Harry, is the soul of honour. Now, I have to explain
certain family matters. The squire’s wife, your maternal grandmother,
was a rich heiress. Part of her money was settled on her to descend to
her children by reversion upon her death. What she herself possessed she
bequeathed to them in reversion likewise to their children. Thus at your
maternal grandmother’s death, your mother and your aunt inherited money
to use as their own, and the interest of money tied fast in reversion
to their children (in case of marriage) after their death. Your
grandfather, as your natural guardian, has left the annual interest of
your money to accumulate, and now you are of age he hands it to you, as
you see, without much delay. Thus you become this day the possessor of
seventy thousand pounds, respecting the disposal of which I am here
to take your orders. Ahem!--as to the remaining property of your
mother’s--the sum held by her for her own use, I mean, it devolved
to her husband, your father, who, it is probable, will furnish you an
account of it--ah!--at his leisure--ah! um! And now, in addition,
Mr. Harry, I have the squire’s commands to speak to you as a man of
business, on what may be deemed a delicate subject, though from the
business point of view no peculiar delicacy should pertain to it. Your
grandfather will settle on you estates and money to the value of twenty
thousand pounds per annum on the day of your union with a young lady in
this district, Miss Janet Ilchester. He undertakes likewise to provide
her pin-money. Also, let me observe, that it is his request--but he
makes no stipulation of it that you will ultimately assume the name of
Beltham, subscribing yourself Harry Lepel Richmond Beltham; or, if it
pleases you, Richmond-Beltham, with the junction hyphen. Needless to
say, he leaves it to your decision. And now, Mr. Harry, I have done, and
may most cordially congratulate you on the blessings it has pleased a
kind and discerning Providence to shower on your head.’

None so grimly ironical as the obsequious! I thought of Burgin’s
‘discerning’ providence (he spoke with all professional sincerity) in
after days.

On the occasion I thought of nothing but the squire’s
straight-forwardness, and grieved to have to wound him. Janet helped me.
She hinted with a bashfulness, quite new to her, that I must go through
some ceremony. Guessing what it was, I saluted her on the cheek. The
squire observed that a kiss of that sort might as well have been planted
on her back hair. ‘But,’ said he, and wisely, ‘I’d rather have the girl
worth ten of you, than you be more than her match. Girls like my girl
here are precious.’ Owing to her intercession, he winked at my departure
after I had done duty among the tenants; he barely betrayed his
vexation, and it must have been excessive.

Heriot and I rode over to Dipwell. Next night we rode back by moonlight
with matter for a year of laughter, singing like two Arabian poets
praises of dark and fair, challengeing one to rival the other. Kiomi!
Mabel! we shouted separately. We had just seen the dregs of the last of
the birthday Burgundy.

‘Kiomi! what a splendid panther she is!’ cries Heriot; and I: ‘Teeth
and claws, and a skin like a burnt patch on a common! Mabel’s like a
wonderful sunflower.’

‘Butter and eggs! old Richie, and about as much fire as a rushlight. If
the race were Fat she ‘d beat the world.’

‘Heriot, I give you my word of honour, the very look of her ‘s eternal
Summer. Kiomi rings thin--she tinkles; it ‘s the difference between
metal and flesh.’

‘Did she tinkle, as you call it, when that fellow Destrier, confound
him! touched her?’

‘The little cat! Did you notice Mabel’s blush?’

‘How could I help it? We’ve all had a dozen apiece. You saw little Kiomi
curled up under the hop and briony?’

‘I took her for a dead jackdaw.’

‘I took her for what she is, and she may slap, scream, tear, and bite, I
‘ll take her yet-and all her tribe crying thief, by way of a diversion.
She and I are footed a pair.’

His impetuosity surpassed mine so much that I fell to brooding on the
superior image of my charmer. The result was, I could not keep away from
her. I managed to get home with leaden limbs. Next day I was back at
Dipwell.

Such guilt as I have to answer for I may avow. I made violent love
to this silly country beauty, and held every advantage over her other
flatterers. She had met me on the evening of the great twenty-first, she
and a line of damsels dressed in white and wearing wreaths, and I had
claimed the privilege of saluting her. The chief superintendent of the
festivities, my father’s old cook, Monsieur Alphonse, turned twilight
into noonday with a sheaf of rockets at the moment my lips brushed her
cheek. It was a kiss marred; I claimed to amend it. Besides, we had been
bosom friends in childhood. My wonder at the growth of the rose I had
left but an insignificant thorny shoot was exquisite natural flattery,
sweet reason, to which she could not say nonsense. At each step we trod
on souvenirs, innocent in themselves, had they recurred to childish
minds. The whisper, ‘Hark! it’s sunset, Mabel, Martha Thresher calls,’
clouded her face with stormy sunset colours. I respected Martha even
then for boldly speaking to me on the girl’s behalf. Mrs. Waddy’s
courage failed. John Thresher and Mark Sweetwinter were overcome by my
father’s princely prodigality; their heads were turned, they appeared
to have assumed that I could do no wrong. To cut short the episode, some
one wrote to the squire in uncouth English, telling him I was courting
a country lass, and he at once started me for the Continent. We had some
conversation on money before parting. The squire allowed me a thousand
a year, independent of my own income. He counselled prudence, warned me
that I was on my trial, and giving me his word of honour that he should
not spy into my Bank accounts, desired me to be worthy of the trust
reposed in me. Speculation he forbade. I left him satisfied with the
assurance that I meant to make my grand tour neither as a merchant, a
gambler, nor a rake, but simply as a plain English gentleman.

‘There’s nothing better in the world than that,’ said he.

Arrived in London, I left my travelling companion, the Rev. Ambrose
Peterborough, sipping his Port at the hotel, and rushed down to Dipwell,
shot a pebble at Mabel’s window by morning twilight, and soon had her
face at the casement. But it was a cloudy and rainbeaten face. She
pointed toward the farm, saying that my father was there.

‘Has he grieved you, Mabel?’ I asked softly.

‘Oh, no, not he! he wouldn’t, he couldn’t; he talked right. Oh, go,
go: for I haven’t a foot to move. And don’t speak so soft; I can’t bear
kindness.’

My father in admonishing her had done it tenderly, I was sure.
Tenderness was the weapon which had wounded her, and so she shrank from
it; and if I had reproached and abused her she might, perhaps, have
obeyed me by coming out, not to return. She was deaf. I kissed my hand
to her regretfully; a condition of spirit gradually dissolved by the
haunting phantom of her forehead and mouth crumpling up for fresh floods
of tears. Had she concealed that vision with her handkerchief, I might
have waited to see her before I saw my father. He soon changed the set
of the current.

‘Our little Mabel here,’ he said, ‘is an inflammable puss, I fear. By
the way, talking of girls, I have a surprise for you. Remind me of
it when we touch Ostend. We may want a yacht there to entertain high
company. I have set inquiries afloat for the hire of a schooner. This
child Mabel can read and write, I suppose? Best write no letters, boy.
Do not make old Dipwell a thorny bed. I have a portrait to show you,
Richie. A portrait! I think you will say the original was worthy of more
than to be taken up and thrown away like a weed. You see, Richie, girls
have only one chance in the world, and good God! to ruin that--no, no.
You shall see this portrait. A pretty little cow-like Mabel, I grant
you. But to have her on the conscience! What a coronet to wear! My
young Lord Destrier--you will remember him as one of our guests here; I
brought him to make your acquaintance; well, he would not be scrupulous,
it is possible. Ay, but compare yourself with him, Richie! and you and
I, let us love one another and have no nettles.’

He flourished me away to London, into new spheres of fancy. He was
irresistible.

In a London Club I was led up to the miniature of a youthful woman,
singular for her endearing beauty Her cheeks were merry red, her lips
lively with the spark of laughter, her eyes in good union with them,
showing you the laughter was gentle; eyes of overflowing blue light.

‘Who is she?’ I asked.

The old-fashioned building of the powdered hair counselled me to add,
‘Who was she?’

Captain DeWitt, though a member of the Club, seemed unable to inform
me. His glance consulted my father. He hummed and drawled, and said:
‘Mistress Anastasia Dewsbury; that was her name.’

‘She does not look a grandmother,’ said my father.

‘She would be one by this time, I dare say,’ said I.

We gazed in silence.

‘Yes!’ he sighed. ‘She was a charming actress, and one of the best of
women. A noble-minded young woman! A woman of cultivation and genius! Do
you see a broken heart in that face? No? Very well. A walk will take us
to her grave. She died early.’

I was breathing ‘Who?’ when he said, ‘She was my mother, my dear.’

It was piteous.

We walked to an old worn flat stone in a London street, where under I
had to imagine those features of beautiful humanity lying shut from us.

She had suffered in life miserably.



CHAPTER XXIV. I MEET THE PRINCESS

Hearing that I had not slept at the hotel, the Rev. Ambrose rushed down
to Riversley with melancholy ejaculations, and was made to rebound
by the squire’s contemptuous recommendation to him to learn to know
something of the spirit of young bloods, seeing that he had the nominal
charge of one, and to preach his sermon in secret, if he would be
sermonizing out of church. The good gentleman had not exactly understood
his duties, or how to conduct them. Far from objecting to find me in
company with my father, as he would otherwise have done by transmitting
information of that fact to Riversley, he now congratulated himself
on it, and after the two had conversed apart, cordially agreed to our
scheme of travelling together. The squire had sickened him. I believe
that by comparison he saw in my father a better friend of youth.

‘We shall not be the worse for a ghostly adviser at hand,’ my father
said to me with his quaintest air of gravity and humour mixed, which was
not insincerely grave, for the humour was unconscious. ‘An accredited
casuist may frequently be a treasure. And I avow it, I like to travel
with my private chaplain.’

Mr. Peterborough’s temporary absence had allowed me time for getting
ample funds placed at our disposal through the agency of my father’s
solicitors, Messrs. Dettermain and Newson, whom I already knew from
certain transactions with them on his behalf. They were profoundly
courteous to me, and showed me his box, and alluded to his Case--a long
one, and a lamentable, I was taught to apprehend, by their lugubriously
professional tone about it. The question was naturally prompted in me,
‘Why do you not go on with it?’

‘Want of funds.’

‘There’s no necessity to name that now,’ I insisted. But my father
desired them to postpone any further exposition of the case, saying,
‘Pleasure first, business by-and-by. That, I take it, is in the order
of our great mother Nature, gentlemen. I will not have him help shoulder
his father’s pack until he has had his, fill of entertainment.’

A smooth voyage brought us in view of the towers of Ostend at sunrise.
Standing with my father on deck, and gazing on this fringe of the grand
romantic Continent, I remembered our old travels, and felt myself bound
to him indissolubly, ashamed of my recent critical probings of
his character. My boy’s love for him returned in full force. I was
sufficiently cognizant of his history to know that he kept his
head erect, lighted by the fire of his robust heart in the thick of
overhanging natal clouds. As the way is with men when they are too happy
to be sentimental, I chattered of anything but my feelings.

‘What a capital idea that was of yours to bring down old Alphonse to
Dipwell! You should have heard old John Thresher and Mark Sweetwinter
and the others grumbling at the interference of “French frogs;” with
their beef, though Alphonse vowed he only ordered the ox to be turned
faster, and he dressed their potatoes in six different ways. I doubt if
Dipwell has composed itself yet. You know I sat for president in their
tent while the beef went its first round; and Alphonse was in an awful
hurry to drag me into what he called the royal tent. By the way, you
should have hauled the standard down at sunset.’

‘Not when the son had not come down among us,’ said my father, smiling.

‘Well, I forgot to tell you about Alphonse. By the way, we’ll have him
in our service. There was he plucking at me: “Monsieur Henri-Richie,
Monsieur Henri-Richie! mille complimens... et les potages, Monsieur!--a
la Camerani, a la tortue, aux petits pois... c’est en vrai artiste
que j’ai su tout retarder jusqu’au dernier moment.... Monsieur! cher
Monsieur Henri-Richie, je vous en supplie, laissez-la, ces planteurs de
choux.” And John Thresher, as spokesman for the rest: “Master Harry, we
beg to say, in my name, we can’t masticate comfortably while we’ve got
a notion Mr. Frenchman he ‘s present here to play his Frenchified tricks
with our plain wholesome dishes. Our opinion is, he don’t know beef from
hedgehog; and let him trim ‘em, and egg ‘em,’ and bread-crumb ‘em, and
pound the mess all his might, and then tak’ and roll ‘em into balls,
we say we wun’t, for we can’t make English muscle out o’ that.”--And
Alphonse, quite indifferent to the vulgar: “He! mais pensez donc au
Papa, Monsieur Henri-Richie, sans doute il a une sante de fer: mais
encore faut-il lui menager le suc gastrique, pancreatique....”’

‘Ay, ay!’ laughed my father; ‘what sets you thinking of Alphonse?’

‘I suppose because I shall have to be speaking French in an hour.’

‘German, Richie, German.’

‘But these Belgians speak French.’

‘Such French as it is. You will, however, be engaged in a German
conversation first, I suspect.’

‘Very well, I’ll stumble on. I don’t much like it.’

‘In six hours from this second of time, Richie, boy, I undertake
to warrant you fonder of the German tongue than of any other spoken
language.’

I looked at him. He gave me a broad pleasant smile, without sign of a
jest lurking in one corner.

The scene attracted me. Laughing fishwife faces radiant with sea-bloom
in among the weedy pier-piles, and sombre blue-cheeked officers of the
douane, with their double row of buttons extending the breadth of their
shoulders. My father won Mr. Peterborough’s approval by declaring cigars
which he might easily have passed.

‘And now, sir,’--he used the commanding unction of a lady’s
doctor,--‘you to bed, and a short repose. We will, if it pleases you,
breakfast at eight. I have a surprise for Mr. Richie. We are about to
beat the drum in the market-place, and sing out for echoes.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ said the simple man.

‘I promise you we shall not disturb you, Mr. Peterborough. You have
reached that middle age, have you not, when sleep is, so to put it, your
capital? And your activity is the interest you draw from it to live
on. You have three good hours. So, then, till we meet at the
breakfast-table.’

My father’s first proceeding at the hotel was to examine the list of
visitors. He questioned one of the waiters aside, took information from
him, and seized my arm rather tremulously, saying,

‘They are here. ‘Tis as I expected. And she is taking the morning breath
of sea-air on the dunes. Come, Richie, come.’

‘Who’s the “she”?’ I asked incuriously.

‘Well, she is young, she is of high birth, she is charming. We have a
crowned head or two here. I observe in you, Richie, an extraordinary
deficiency of memory. She has had an illness; Neptune speed her
recovery! Now for a turn at our German. Die Strassen ruhen; die
Stadt schlaft; aber dort, siehst Du, dort liegt das blaue Meer, das
nimmer-schlafende! She is gazing on it, and breathing it, Richie.
Ach! ihr jauchzende Seejungfern. On my soul, I expect to see the very
loveliest of her sex!

You must not be dismayed at pale cheeks-blasse Wangen. Her illness has
been alarming. Why, this air is the top of life; it will, and it
shall, revive her. How will she address him?--“Freund,” in my presence,
perchance: she has her invalid’s privilege. “Theure Prinzessin” you
might venture on. No ice! Ay, there she is!’

Solitary, on the long level of the sand-bank, I perceived a group that
became discernible as three persons attached to an invalid’s chair,
moving leisurely toward us. I was in the state of mind between
divination and doubt when the riddle is not impossible to read, would
but the heart cease its hurry an instant; a tumbled sky where the break
is coming. It came. The dear old days of my wanderings with Temple
framed her face. I knew her without need of pause or retrospect. The
crocus raising its cup pointed as when it pierced the earth, and the
crocus stretched out on earth, wounded by frost, is the same flower.
The face was the same, though the features were changed. Unaltered in
expression, but wan, and the kind blue eyes large upon lean brows, her
aspect was that of one who had been half caught away and still shook
faintly in the relaxing invisible grasp.

We stopped at a distance of half-a-dozen paces to allow her time for
recollection. She eyed us softly in a fixed manner, while the sea-wind
blew her thick redbrown hair to threads on her cheek. Colour on the fair
skin told us we were recognized.

‘Princess Ottilia!’ said my father.

‘It is I, my friend,’ she answered. ‘And you?’

‘With more health than I am in need of, dearest princess.’

‘And he?’

‘Harry Richmond! my son, now of age, commencing his tour; and he has not
forgotten the farewell bunch of violets.’

Her eyelids gently lifted, asking me.

‘Nor the mount you did me the honour to give me on the little
Hungarian,’ said I.

‘How nice this sea-air is!’ she spoke in English. ‘England and sea go
together in my thoughts. And you are here! I have been down very low,
near the lowest. But your good old sea makes me breathe again. I want to
toss on it. Have you yet seen the Markgrafin?’

My father explained that we had just landed from the boat.

‘Is our meeting, then, an accident?’

‘Dear princess, I heard of your being out by the shore.’

‘Ah! kind: and you walked to meet me? I love that as well, though I love
chance. And it is chance that brings you here! I looked out on the boat
from England while they were dressing me: I cannot have too much of the
morning, for then I have all to myself: sea and sky and I. The night
people are all asleep, and you come like an old Marchen.’

Her eyelids dropped without closing.

‘Speak no more to her just at present,’ said an English voice, Miss
Silbey’s. Schwartz, the huge dragoon, whose big black horse hung near
him in my memory like a phantom, pulled the chair at a quiet pace, head
downward. A young girl clad in plain black walked beside Miss Sibley,
following the wheels.

‘Danger is over,’ Miss Sibley answered my gaze. ‘She is convalescent.
You see how weak she is.’

I praised the lady for what I deemed her great merit in not having
quitted the service of the princess.

‘Oh!’ said she, ‘my adieux to Sarkeld were uttered years ago. But when I
heard of her fall from the horse I went and nursed her. We were once
in dread of her leaving us. She sank as if she had taken some internal
injury. It may have been only the shock to her system and the cessation
of her accustomed exercise. She has a little over-studied.’

‘The margravine?’

‘The margravine is really very good and affectionate, and has won my
esteem. So you and your father are united at last? We have often talked
of you. Oh! that day up by the tower. But, do you know, the statue
is positively there now, and no one--no one who had the privilege
of beholding the first bronze Albrecht Wohlgemuth, Furst von
Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld, no one will admit that the second is half worthy of
him. I can feel to this day the leap of the heart in my mouth when the
statue dismounted. The prince sulked for a month: the margravine still
longer at your father’s evasion. She could not make allowance for the
impulsive man: such a father; such a son!’

‘Thank you, thank you most humbly,’ said I, bowing to her shadow of a
mock curtsey.

The princess’s hand appeared at a side of the chair. We hastened to her.

‘Let me laugh, too,’ she prayed.

Miss Sibley was about to reply, but stared, and delight sprang to her
lips in a quick cry.

‘What medicine is this? Why, the light of morning has come to you, my
darling!’

‘I am better, dearest, better.’

‘You sigh, my own.’

‘No; I breathe lots, lots of salt air now, and lift like a boat. Ask
him--he had a little friend, much shorter than himself, who came the
whole way with him out of true friendship--ask him where is the friend?’

Miss Sibley turned her head to me.

‘Temple,’ said I; ‘Temple is a midshipman; he is at sea.’

‘That is something to think of,’ the princess murmured, and dropped her
eyelids a moment. She resumed ‘The Grand Seigneur was at Vienna last
year, and would not come to Sarkeld, though he knew I was ill.’

My father stooped low.

‘The Grand Seigneur, your servant, dear princess, was an Ottoman Turk,
and his Grand Vizier advised him to send flowers in his place weekly.’

‘I had them, and when we could get those flowers nowhere else,’ she
replied. ‘So it was you! So my friends have been about me.’

During the remainder of the walk I was on one side of the chair, and
her little maid on the other, while my father to rearward conversed
with Miss Sibley. The princess took a pleasure in telling me that this
Aennchen of hers knew me well, and had known me before ever her mistress
had seen me. Aennchen was the eldest of the two children Temple and I
had eaten breakfast with in the forester’s hut. I felt myself as if in
the forest again, merely wondering at the growth of the trees, and the
narrowness of my vision in those days.

At parting, the princess said,

‘Is my English improved? You smiled at it once. I will ask you when I
meet you next.’

‘It is my question,’ I whispered to my own ears.

She caught the words.

‘Why do you say--“It is my question”?’

I was constrained to remind her of her old forms of English speech.

‘You remember that? Adieu,’ she said.

My father considerately left me to carry on my promenade alone. I
crossed the ground she had traversed, noting every feature surrounding
it, the curving wheel-track, the thin prickly sand-herbage, the
wave-mounds, the sparse wet shells and pebbles, the gleaming flatness
of the water, and the vast horizon-boundary of pale flat land level with
shore, looking like a dead sister of the sea. By a careful examination
of my watch and the sun’s altitude, I was able to calculate what would,
in all likelihood, have been his height above yonder waves when her
chair was turned toward the city, at a point I reached in the track. But
of the matter then simultaneously occupying my mind, to recover which
was the second supreme task I proposed to myself-of what. I also was
thinking upon the stroke of five o’clock, I could recollect nothing.
I could not even recollect whether I happened to be looking on sun and
waves when she must have had them full and glorious in her face.



CHAPTER XXV. ON BOARD A YACHT

With the heartiest consent I could give, and a blank cheque, my father
returned to England to hire forthwith a commodious yacht, fitted and
manned. Before going he discoursed of prudence in our expenditure;
though not for the sake of the mere money in hand, which was a trifle,
barely more than the half of my future income; but that the squire,
should he by and by bethink him of inspecting our affairs, might
perceive we were not spendthrifts.

‘I promised you a surprise, Richie,’ said he, ‘and you have had it;
whether at all equal to your expectations is for you to determine. I
was aware of the margravine’s intention to bring the princess to these
sea-sands; they are famous on the Continent. It was bruited last Winter
and Spring that she would be here in the season for bathing; so I held
it likely we should meet. We have, you behold. In point of fact, we owe
the good margravine some show of hospitality. The princess has a passion
for tossing on the sea. To her a yacht is a thing dropped from the moon.
His Highness the prince her father could as soon present her with one as
with the moon itself. The illustrious Serenity’s revenue is absorbed,
my boy, in the state he has to support. As for his daughter’s dowry, the
young gentleman who anticipates getting one with her, I commend to the
practise of his whistling. It will be among the sums you may count, if
you are a moderate arithmetician, in groschen. The margravine’s income I
should reckon to approach twenty thousand per annum, and she proves her
honourable sense that she holds it in trust for others by dispersing it
rapidly. I fear she loves cards. So, then, I shall go and hire the yacht
through Dettermain and Newson, furnish it with piano and swing-cot,
etc.; and if the ladies shrink from a cruise they can have an occasional
sail. Here are we at their service. I shall be seriously baffled by
fortune if I am not back to you at the end of a week. You will take
your early morning walk, I presume. On Sunday see that our chaplain, the
excellent Mr. Peterborough, officiates for the assembled Protestants of
all nations. It excites our English enthusiasm. In addition, son Richie,
it is peculiarly our duty. I, at least, hold the view that it is a
family duty. Think it over, Richie boy. Providence, you see, has sent us
the man. As for me, I feel as if I were in the dawn of one life with all
the mature experience of another. I am calm, I am perfectly unexcited,
and I tell you, old son, I believe--pick among the highest--our
destinies are about the most brilliant of any couple in Great Britain.’

His absence relieved me in spite of my renewed pleasure in his talk; I
may call it a thirsty craving to have him inflating me, puffing the deep
unillumined treasure-pits of my nature with laborious hints, as mines
are filled with air to keep the miners going. While he talked he made
these inmost recesses habitable. But the pain lay in my having now
and then to utter replies. The task of speaking was hateful. I found
a sweetness in brooding unrealizingly over hopes and dreams and
possibilities, and I let him go gladly that I might enjoy a week of
silence, just taking impressions as they came, like the sands in the
ebb-tide. The impression of the morning was always enough for a day’s
meditation. The green colour and the crimson athwart it, and higher up
the pinky lights, flamingo feathers, on a warm half-circle of heaven, in
hue between amethyst and milky opal; then the rim of the sun’s disc not
yet severe; and then the monstrous shadow of tall Schwartz darting at me
along the sand, then the princess. This picture, seen at sunrise, lasted
till I slept. It stirred no thoughts, conjured no images, it possessed
me. In the afternoon the margravine accompanied the princess to a point
facing seaward, within hearing of the military band. She did me the
favour to tell me that she tolerated me until I should become efficient
in German to amuse her, but the dulness of the Belgian city compared
with her lively German watering-places compelled her to try my powers of
fun in French, and in French I had to do duty, and failed in my office.

‘Do you know,’ said she, ‘that your honourable papa is one in a million?
He has the life of a regiment in his ten fingers. What astonishes me is
that he does not make fury in that England of yours--that Lapland! Je ne
puffs me passer de cet homme! He offends me, he trifles, he outrages, he
dares permit himself to be indignant. Bon! we part, and absence pleads
for him with the eloquence of Satan. I am his victim. Does he, then,
produce no stir whatever in your England? But what a people! But yes,
you resemble us, as bottles--bottles; seulement, you are emptied of your
wine. Ce Monsieur Peterbooroo’! Il m’agace les nerfs. It cannot be blood
in his veins. One longs to see him cuffed, to see if he has the English
lion in him, one knows not where. But you are so, you English, when not
intoxicated. And so censorious! You win your battles, they say, upon
beer and cordials: it is why you never can follow up a success. Je
tiens cela du Marechal Prince B-----. Let that pass. One groans at your
intolerable tristesse. La vie en Angleterre est comme un marais. It is a
scandal to human nature. It blows fogs, foul vapours, joint-stiffnesses,
agues, pestilences, over us here,--yes, here! That is your best side:
but your worst is too atrocious! Mon Dieu! Your men-rascals! Your
women-rascals!’

‘Good soul!’ the princess arrested her, ‘I beg that you will not abuse
England.’

‘Have I abused England?’ exclaimed the margravine. ‘Nay, then, it was
because England is shockingly unjust to the most amusing, the most
reviving, charming of men. There is he fresh as a green bubbling well,
and those English decline to do honour to his source. Now tell me, you!’
She addressed me imperiously. ‘Are you prosecuting his claims? Are you
besieging your Government? What! you are in the season of generosity,
an affectionate son, wealthy as a Magyar prince of flocks, herds, mines,
and men, and you let him stand in the shade deprived of his birthright?
Are you a purse-proud commoner or an imbecile?’

‘My whimsy aunt!’ the princess interposed again, ‘now you have taken to
abusing a defenceless Englishman.’

‘Nothing of the sort, child. I compliment him on his looks and manners;
he is the only one of his race who does not appear to have marched out
of a sentinel’s box with a pocket-mirror in his hand. I thank him from
my soul for not cultivating the national cat’s whisker. None can imagine
what I suffer from the oppressive sight of his Monsieur Peterbooroo’!
And they are of one pattern--the entire nation! He! no, he has the step
of a trained blood-horse. Only, as Kaunitz, or somebody, said of Joseph
II., or somebody, he thinks or he chews. Englishmen’s mouths were
clearly not made for more purposes than one. In truth, I am so utterly
wearied, I could pray for the diversion of a descent of rain. The life
here is as bad as in Rippau. I might just as well be in Rippau doing
duty: the silly people complain, I hear. I am gathering dust. These, my
dear, these are the experiences which age women at a prodigious rate. I
feel chains on my limbs here.’

‘Madame, I would,’ said I, ‘that I were the Perseus to relieve you of
your monster Ennui, but he is coming quickly.’

‘You see he has his pretty phrases!’ cried the margravine; adding
encouragingly, ‘S’il nest pas tant sort peu impertinent?’

The advance of some German or Russian nobleman spared me further
efforts.

We were on shore, listening to the band in the afternoon, when a
sail like a spark of pure white stood on the purple black edge of a
storm-cloud. It was the yacht. By sunset it was moored off shore, and at
night hung with variegated lamps. Early next morning we went on
board. The ladies were astonished at the extent of the vessel, and its
luxurious fittings and cunning arrangements. My father, in fact, had
negotiated for the hire of the yacht some weeks previously, with his
accustomed forethought.

‘House and town and fortress provisioned, and moveable at will!’ the
margravine interjected repeatedly.

The princess was laid on raised pillows in her swingcot under an awning
aft, and watched the sailors, the splendid offspring of old sea-fights,
as I could observe her spirited fancy conceiving them. They were a
set of men to point to for an answer to the margravine’s strictures on
things English.

‘Then, are you the captain, my good Herr Heilbrunn?’ the margravine
asked my father.

He was dressed in cheerful blue, wearing his cheerfullest air, and
seemed strongly inclined for the part of captain, but presented the
actual commander of the schooner-yacht, and helped him through the
margravine’s interrogations.

‘All is excellent,--excellent for a day’s sail,’ she said. ‘I have no
doubt you could nourish my system for a month, but to deal frankly with
you--prepared meats and cold pies!--to face them once is as much as I am
capable of.’

‘Dear Lady Field-Marshal,’ returned my father, ‘the sons of Neptune
would be of poor account, if they could not furnish you cookery at sea.’

They did, for Alphonse was on board. He and my father had a hot
discussion about the margravine’s dishes, Alphonse declaring that it was
against his conscience to season them pungently, and my father preaching
expediency. Alphonse spoke of the artist and his duty to his art, my
father of the wise diplomatist who manipulated individuals without any
sacrifice of principle. They were partly at play, of course, both having
humour.

It ended in the margravine’s being enraptured. The delicacy of the
invalid’s dishes, was beyond praise. ‘So, then, we are absolutely better
housed and accommodated than on shore!’ the margravine made her wonder
heard, and from that fell to enthusiasm for the vessel. After a couple
of pleasant smooth-sailing days, she consented to cruise off the coasts
of France and England. Adieu to the sands. Throughout the cruise she
was placable, satisfied with earth and sea, and constantly eulogizing
herself for this novel state of serenity. Cards, and a collection of
tripping French books bound in yellow, danced the gavotte with time,
which made the flying minutes endurable to her: and for relaxation there
was here the view of a shining town dropped between green hills to dip
in sea-water, yonder a ship of merchandise or war to speculate upon,
trawlers, collier-brigs, sea-birds, wave over wave. No cloud on sun and
moon. We had gold and silver in our track, like the believable children
of fairyland.

The princess, lying in her hammock-cot on deck, both day and night, or
for the greater part of the night, let her eyes feast incessantly on a
laughing sea: when she turned them to any of us, pure pleasure sparkled
in them. The breezy salt hours were visible ecstasy to her blood. If she
spoke it was but to utter a few hurried, happy words, and shrink as you
see the lightning behind a cloud-rack, suggestive of fiery swift emotion
within, and she gazed away overjoyed at the swoop and plunge of the
gannet, the sunny spray, the waves curling crested or down-like. At
night a couple of sailors, tender as women, moved her in the cot to her
cabin. We heard her voice in the dark of the morning, and her little
maid Aennchen came out and was met by me; and I at that hour had the
privilege to help move her back to her favourite place, and strap the
iron-stand fast, giving the warm-hooded cot room to swing. The keen
sensations of a return to health amid unwonted scenes made things
magical to her. When she beheld our low green Devon hills she signalled
for help to rise, and ‘That is England!’ she said, summoning to her
beautiful clear eyeballs the recollection of her first desire to see my
country. Her petition was that the yacht should go in nearer and nearer
to the land till she could discern men, women, and children, and their
occupations. A fisherman and his wife sat in the porch above their
hanging garden, the woman knitting, the man mending his nets, barefooted
boys and girls astride the keel of a boat below them. The princess eyed
them and wept. ‘They give me happiness; I can give them nothing,’ she
said.

The margravine groaned impatiently at talk of such a dieaway sort.

My father sent a couple of men on shore with a gift of money to their
family in the name of the Princess Ottilia. How she thanked him for his
prompt ideas! ‘It is because you are generous you read one well.’

She had never thanked me. I craved for that vibrating music as of her
deep heart penetrated and thrilling, but shrank from grateful words
which would have sounded payment. Running before the wind swiftly on a
night of phosphorescent sea, when the waves opened to white hollows with
frayed white ridges, wreaths of hissing silver, her eyelids closed, and
her hand wandered over the silken coverlet to the hammock cloth, and
up, in a blind effort to touch. Mine joined to it. Little Aennchen was
witness. Ottilia held me softly till her slumber was deep.



CHAPTER XXVI. IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN’S BIRTHPLACE

Our cruise came to an end in time to save the margravine from yawning.
The last day of it was windless, and we hung in sight of the colourless
low Flemish coast for hours, my father tasking his ingenuity to amuse
her. He sang with Miss Sibley, rallied Mr. Peterborough, played picquet
to lose, threw over the lead line to count the fathoms, and whistling
for the breeze, said to me, ‘We shall decidedly have to offer her an
exhibition of tipsy British seamen as a final resource. The case is
grave either way; but we cannot allow the concluding impression to be a
dull one.’

It struck me with astonishment to see the vigilant watch she kept over
the princess this day, after having left her almost uninterruptedly to
my care.

‘You are better?’ She addressed Ottilia. ‘You can sit up? You think you
can walk? Then I have acted rightly, nay, judiciously,--I have not made
a sacrifice for nothing. I took the cruise, mind you, on your account.
You would study yourself to the bone, till you looked like a canary’s
quill, with that Herr Professor of yours. Now I ‘ve given you a dose of
life. Yes, you begin to look like human flesh. Something has done you
good.’

The princess flushing scarlet, the margravine cried,

‘There’s no occasion for you to have the whole British army in your
cheeks. Goodness me! what’s the meaning of it? Why, you answer me like
flags, banners, uhlans’ pennons, fullfrocked cardinals!’

My father stepped in.

‘Ah, yes,’ said the margravine. ‘But you little know, my good Roy, the
burden of an unmarried princess; and heartily glad shall I be to hand
her over to Baroness Turckems. That’s her instituted governess, duenna,
dragon, what you will. She was born for responsibility, I was not; it
makes me miserable. I have had no holiday. True, while she was like
one of their wax virgins I had a respite. Fortunately, I hear of you
English, that when you fall to sighing, you suck your thumbs and are
consoled.’

My father bowed her, and smiled her, and whirled her away from the
subject. I heard him say, under his breath, that he had half a mind to
issue orders for an allowance of grog to be served out to the sailors on
the spot. I suggested, as I conceived in a similar spirit the forcible
ducking of Mr. Peterborough. He appeared to entertain and relish the
notion in earnest.

‘It might do. It would gratify her enormously,’ he said, and eyed the
complacent clerical gentleman with transparent jealousy of his claims
to decent treatment. ‘Otherwise, I must confess,’ he added, ‘I am at a
loss. My wits are in the doldrums.’

He went up to Mr. Peterborough, and, with an air of great sincerity and
courtesy, requested him in French to create a diversion for her Highness
the Margravine of Rippau during the extreme heat of the afternoon by
precipitating himself headlong into forty fathoms, either attached or
unattached. His art in baffling Mr. Peterborough’s attempts to treat
the unheard-of request as a jest was extraordinary. The ingenuity of
his successive pleas for pressing such a request pertinaciously upon
Mr. Peterborough in particular, his fixed eye, yet cordial deferential
manner, and the stretch of his forefinger, and argumentative turn of the
head--indicative of an armed disputant fully on the alert, and as if
it were of profound and momentous importance that he should thoroughly
defeat and convince his man--overwhelmed us. Mr. Peterborough, not being
supple in French, fell back upon his English with a flickering smile
of protestation; but even in his native tongue he could make no head
against the tremendous volubility and brief eager pauses besetting him.

The farce was too evanescent for me to reproduce it.

Peterborough turned and fled to his cabin. Half the crew were on the
broad grin. The margravine sprang to my father’s arm, and entreated him
to be her guest in her Austrian mountain summer-seat. Ottilia was now
her darling and her comfort. Whether we English youth sucked our thumbs,
or sighed furiously, she had evidently ceased to care. Mr. Peterborough
assured me at night that he had still a difficulty in persuading himself
of my father’s absolute sanity, so urgent was the fire of his eye
in seconding his preposterous proposal; and, as my father invariably
treated with the utmost reserve a farce played out, they never arrived
at an understanding about it, beyond a sententious agreement once, in
the extreme heat of an Austrian highland valley, that the option of
taking a header into sea-water would there be divine.

Our yacht winged her way home. Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld,
accompanied by Baroness Turckems, and Prince Otto, his nephew, son
of the Prince of Eisenberg, a captain of Austrian lancers, joined the
margravine in Wurtemberg, and we felt immediately that domestic affairs
were under a different management. Baroness Turckems relieved the
margravine of her guard. She took the princess into custody. Prince
Ernest greeted us with some affability; but it was communicated to my
father that he expected an apology before he could allow himself to be
as absolutely unclouded toward us as the blaze of his titles. My father
declined to submit; so the prince inquired of us what our destination
was. Down the Danube to the Black Sea and Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, the
Nile, the Desert, India, possibly, and the Himalayas, my father said.
The prince bowed. The highest personages, if they cannot travel, are
conscious of a sort of airy majesty pertaining to one who can command so
wide and far a flight. We were supplicated by the margravine to appease
her brother’s pride with half a word. My father was firm. The margravine
reached her two hands to him. He kissed over them each in turn. They
interchanged smart semi-flattering or cutting sentences.

‘Good!’ she concluded; ‘now I sulk you for five years.’

‘You would decapitate me, madam, and weep over my astonished head, would
you not?’

‘Upon my honour, I would,’ she shook herself to reply.

He smiled rather sadly.

‘No pathos!’ she implored him.

‘Not while I live, madam,’ said he.

At this her countenance underwent a tremour.

‘And when that ends... friend! well, I shall have had my last laugh in
the world.’

Both seemed affected. My father murmured some soothing word.

‘Then you do mean to stay with me?’ the margravine caught him up.

‘Not in livery, your Highness.’

‘To the deuce with you!’ would be a fair translation of the exalted
lady’s reply. She railed at his insufferable pride.

‘And you were wrong, wrong,’ she pursued. ‘You offended the prince
mightily: you travestied his most noble ancestor--’

‘In your service, may it please you.’

‘You offended, offended him, I say, and you haven’t the courage to make
reparation. And when I tell you the prince is manageable as your ship,
if you will only take and handle the rudder. Do you perceive?’

She turned to me.

‘Hither, Mr. Harry; come, persuade him. Why, you do not desire to leave
me, do you?’

Much the reverse. But I had to congratulate myself subsequently on
having been moderate in the expression of my wishes; for, as my father
explained to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the
margravine was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his
plans. She could actually affect to wink at them that she might gain
her point, and have her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously
beguiling a hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially blind or wholly
complaisant. My father knew her and fenced her.

‘Had I yielded,’ he said, when my heart was low after the parting, ‘I
should have shown her my hand. I do not choose to manage the prince that
the margravine may manage me. I pose my pride--immolate my son to it,
Richie? I hope not. No. At Vienna we shall receive an invitation to
Sarkeld for the winter, if we hear nothing of entreaties to turn aside
to Ischl at Munich. She is sure to entreat me to accompany her on her
annual visit to her territory of Rippau, which she detests; and, indeed,
there is not a vine in the length and breadth of it. She thought herself
broad awake, and I have dosed her with an opiate.’

He squeezed my fingers tenderly. I was in want both of consolation and
very delicate handling when we drove out of the little Wurtemberg town:
I had not taken any farewell from Ottilia. Baroness Turckems was already
exercising her functions of dragon. With the terrible forbidding word
‘Repose’ she had wafted the princess to her chamber in the evening, and
folded her inextricably round and round in the morning. The margravine
huffed, the prince icy, Ottilia invisible, I found myself shooting down
from the heights of a dream among shattered fragments of my cloud-palace
before I well knew that I had left off treading common earth. All my
selfish nature cried out to accuse Ottilia. We drove along a dusty
country road that lay like a glaring shaft of the desert between
vineyards and hills.

‘There,’ said my father, waving his hand where the hills on our left
fell to a distance and threw up a lofty head and neck cut with one white
line, ‘your Hohenzollerns shot up there. Their castle looks like a tight
military stock. Upon my word, their native mountain has the air of a
drum major. Mr. Peterborough, have you a mind to climb it? We are at
your disposal.’

‘Thank you, thank you, sir,’ said the Rev. Ambrose, gazing
enthusiastically, but daunted by the heat: ‘if it is your wish?’

‘We have none that is not yours, Mr. Peterborough. You love ruins,
and we are adrift just now. I presume we can drive to the foot of the
ascent. I should wish my son perhaps to see the source of great houses.’

Here it was that my arm was touched by old Schwartz. He saluted stiffly,
and leaning from the saddle on the trot of his horse at an even pace
with our postillion, stretched out a bouquet of roses. I seized it
palpitating, smelt the roses, and wondered. May a man write of his
foolishness?--tears rushed to my eyes. Schwartz was far behind us when
my father caught sight of the magical flowers.

‘Come!’ said he, glowing, ‘we will toast the Hohenstaufens and the
Hohenzollerns to-night, Richie.’

Later, when I was revelling in fancies sweeter than the perfume of the
roses, he pressed their stems reflectively, unbound them, and disclosed
a slip of crested paper. On it was written:

          ‘Violets are over.’

Plain words; but a princess had written them, and never did so golden a
halo enclose any piece of human handiwork.



CHAPTER XXVII. THE TIME OF ROSES

I sat and thrilled from head to foot with a deeper emotion than joy. Not
I, but a detached self allied to the careering universe and having life
in it.

‘Violets are over.’

The first strenuous effort of my mind was to grasp the meaning,
subtle as odour, in these words. Innumerable meanings wreathed away
unattainable to thought. The finer senses could just perceive them ere
they vanished. Then as I grew material, two camps were pitched and two
armies prepared to fight to establish one distinct meaning. ‘Violets are
over, so I send you roses’; she writes you simple fact. Nay, ‘Our
time of violets is over, now for us the roses’; she gives you heavenly
symbolism.

‘From violets to roses, so run the seasons.’

Or is it,

‘From violets to roses, thus far have we two travelled?’

But would she merely say, ‘I have not this kind of flower, and I send
you another?’

True, but would she dare to say, ‘The violets no longer express my
heart; take the roses?’

‘Maidenly, and a Princess, yet sweet and grateful, she gives you the
gracefullest good speed.

‘Noble above all human distinctions, she binds you to herself, if you
will it.’

The two armies came into collision, the luck of the day going to the one
I sided with.

But it was curiously observable that the opposing force recovered
energy from defeat, while mine languished in victory. I headed them
alternately, and--it invariably happened so.

‘She cannot mean so much as this.’

‘She must mean more than that.’

Thus the Absolute and the Symbolical factions struggled on. A princess
drew them as the moon the tides.

By degrees they subsided and united, each reserving its view; a point
at which I imagined myself to have regained my proper humility. ‘The
princess has sent you these flowers out of her homely friendliness; not
seeing you to speak her farewell, she, for the very reason that she can
do it innocent of any meaning whatsoever, bids you be sure you carry
her esteem with you. Is the sun of blue heavens guilty of the shadow it
casts? Clear your mind. She means nothing. Warmth and beauty come from
her, and are on you for the moment. But full surely she is a thing to be
won: she is human: did not her hand like a gentle snake seek yours, and
detain it, and bear it away into the heart of her sleep?--Be moderate.
Let not a thought or a dream spring from her condescension, lest you
do outrage to her noble simplicity. Look on that high Hohenzollern
hill-top: she also is of the line of those who help to found illustrious
Houses: what are you?’

I turned to my father and stared him in the face. What was he? Were
we not losing precious time in not prosecuting his suit? I put this
question to him, believing that it would sound as too remote from my
thoughts to betray them. He glanced at the roses, and answered gladly,

‘Yes!--no, no! we must have our holiday. Mr. Peterborough is for
exploring a battle-field in the neighbourhood of Munich. He shall.
I wish him to see the Salzkammergut, and have a taste of German
Court-life. Allow me to be captain, Richie, will you? I will show you
how battles are gained and mountains are scaled. That young Prince Otto
of Eisenberg is a fine young fellow. Those Austrian cavalry regiments
are good training-schools for the carriage of a young man’s head and
limbs. I would match my boy against him in the exercises--fencing,
shooting, riding.’

‘As you did at Bath,’ said I.

He replied promptly: ‘We might give him Anna Penrhys to marry. English
wives are liked here--adored--if they fetch a dowry. Concerning my suit,
Richie, enough if it keeps pace with us: and we are not going slow. It
is a thing certain. Dettermain and Newson have repeatedly said, “Money,
money!’ hand us money, and we guarantee you a public recognition.” Money
we now have. But we cannot be in two fields at once. Is it your desire
to return to England?’

‘Not at all,’ said I, with a chill at the prospect.

‘If it is--?’ he pressed me, and relenting added: ‘I confess I enjoy
this Suabian land as much as you do. Indolence is occasionally charming.
I am at work, nevertheless. But, Richie, determine not to think little
of yourself: there is the main point; believe me, that is half the
battle. You, sir, are one of the wealthiest gentlemen in Europe. You are
pronouncedly a gentleman. That is what we can say of you at present, as
you appear in the world’s eye. And you are by descent illustrious. Well,
no more of that, but consider if you kneel down, who will decline to
put a foot on you? Princes have the habit, and they do it as a matter of
course. Challenge them. And they, Richie, are particularly susceptible
to pity for the misfortunes of their class--kind, I should say, for
class it is not; now I have done. All I tell you is, I intend you, under
my guidance, to be happy.’

I thought his remarks the acutest worldly wisdom I had ever heard,--his
veiled method of treating my case the shrewdest, delicatest, and most
consoling, most inspiring. It had something of the mystical power of the
Oracles,--the power which belongs to anonymous writing. Had he disposed
of my apparent rival, and exalted me to the level of a princely family,
in open speech, he would have conveyed no balm to me--I should have
classed it as one confident man’s opinion. Disguised and vague,
but emphatic, and interpreted by the fine beam of his eye, it was
intoxicating; and when he said subsequently, ‘Our majority Burgundy was
good emperor wine, Richie. You approved it? I laid that vintage down to
give you a lesson to show you that my plans come safe to maturity,’--I
credited him with a large share of foresight, though I well knew
his habit of antedating his sagacity, and could not but smile at the
illustration of it.

You perceive my state without rendering it necessary for me to label
myself.

I saw her next in a pinewood between Ischl and the Traun. I had climbed
the steep hill alone, while my father and Mr. Peterborough drove round
the carriage-road to the margravine’s white villa. Ottilia was leaning
on the arm of Baroness Turckems, walking--a miracle that disentangled
her cruelly from my net of fancies. The baroness placed a second hand
upon her as soon as I was seen standing in the path. Ottilia’s face
coloured like the cyclamen at her feet.

‘You!’ she said.

‘I might ask, is it you, princess?’

‘Some wonder has been worked, you see.’

‘I thank heaven.’

‘You had a part in it.’

‘The poorest possible.’

‘Yet I shall presume to call you Doctor Oceanus,’

‘Will you repeat his medicine? The yacht awaits you always.’

‘When I am well I study. Do not you?’

‘I have never studied in my life.’

‘Ah, lose no more time. The yacht is delicious idleness, but it is
idleness. I am longing for it now, I am still so very weak. My dear
Sibley has left me to be married. She marries a Hanoverian officer. We
change countries--I mean,’ the princess caught back her tongue, ‘she
will become German, not compatriot of your ships of war. My English
rebukes me. I cease to express... It is like my walking, done half for
pride, I think. Baroness, lower me, and let me rest.’

The baroness laid her gently on the dry brown pine-sheddings, and blew
a whistle that hung at her girdle, by which old Schwartzy kept out of
sight to encourage the princess’s delusion of pride in her walking, was
summoned. Ottilia had fainted. The baroness shot a suspicious glance at
me. ‘It comes of this everlasting English talk,’ I heard her mutter.
She was quick to interpose between me and the form I had once raised and
borne undisputedly.

‘Schwartz is the princess’s attendant, sir,’ she said. ‘In future, may I
request you to talk German?’

The Prince of Eppenwelzen and Prince Otto were shooting in the
mountains. The margravine, after conversing with the baroness, received
me stiffly. She seemed eager to be rid of us; was barely hospitable. My
mind was too confused to take much note of words and signs. I made an
appointment to meet my father the day following, and walked away and
returned at night, encountered Schwartz and fed on the crumbs of tidings
I got from him, a good, rough old faithful fellow, far past the age for
sympathy, but he had carried Ottilia when she was an infant, and meant
to die in her service. I thought him enviable above most creatures.

His principal anxiety was about my finding sleeping quarters. When he
had delivered himself three times over of all that I could lead him to
say, I left him still puffing at his pipe. He continued on guard to be
in readiness to run for a doctor, should one be wanted. Twice in the
night I came across his path. The night was quiet, dark blue, and
starry; the morning soft and fragrant. The burden of the night was
bearable, but that of daylight I fled from, and all day I was like one
expecting a crisis. Laughter, with so much to arouse it, hardly had any
foothold within me to stir my wits. For if I said ‘Folly!’ I did not
feel it, and what I felt I did not understand. My heart and head were
positively divided. Days and weeks were spent in reconciling them a
little; days passed with a pencil and scribbled slips of paper--the
lines written with regular commencements and irregular terminations; you
know them. Why had Ottilia fainted? She recommended hard study--thinks
me idle, worthless; she has a grave intelligence, a serious estimation
of life; she thinks me intrinsically of the value of a summer fly. But
why did she say, ‘We change countries,’ and immediately flush, break and
falter, lose command of her English, grow pale and swoon; why? With this
question my disastrous big heart came thundering up to the closed doors
of-comprehension. It was unanswerable. ‘We change countries.’ That is,
she and Miss Sibley change countries, because the English woman marries
a German, and the German princess--oh! enormous folly. Pierce it,
slay it, trample it under. Is that what the insane heart is big with?
Throughout my night-watch I had been free of it, as one who walks
meditating in cloisters on a sentence that once issued from divine lips.
There was no relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest
laughter a chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits
raised for war, going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate
shoulders, and feet of distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze
a rhythmical drill-sergeant. I exulted at the first reading, shuddered
at the second, and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat
staring at vacancy as if I had now lost the power of speech.

At last I flung away idleness and came to a good resolution; and I
carried it through. I studied at a famous German university, not far
from Hanover. My father, after discussing my project with me from the
point of view of amazement, settled himself in the University town,
a place of hopeless dulness, where the stones of the streets and the
houses seemed to have got their knotty problem to brood over, and
never knew holiday. A fire for acquisition possessed me, and soon an
ungovernable scorn for English systems of teaching--sound enough for the
producing of gentlemen, and perhaps of merchants; but gentlemen rather
bare of graces, and merchants not too scientific in finance. Mr.
Peterborough conducted the argument against me until my stout display
of facts, or it may have been my insolence, combined with the ponderous
pressure of the atmosphere upon one who was not imbibing a counteracting
force, drove him on a tour among German cathedrals.

Letters from Riversley informed me that my proceedings were approved,
though the squire wanted me near him. We offered entertainments to the
students on a vast scale. The local newspaper spoke of my father as the
great Lord Roy. So it happened that the margravine at Sarkeld heard of
us. Returning from a visit to the prince’s palace, my father told me
that he saw an opportunity for our being useful to the prince, who
wanted money to work a newly-discovered coal-mine in his narrow
dominions, and he suggested that I might induce the squire to supply it;
as a last extremity I could advance the money. Meanwhile he had engaged
to accompany the prince in mufti to England to examine into the working
of coal-mines, and hire an overseer and workmen to commence operations
on the Sarkeld property. It would be obligatory to entertain him fitly
in London.

‘Certainly,’ said I.

‘During our absence the margravine will do her best to console you,
Richie. The prince chafes at his poverty. We give him a display of
wealth in England; here we are particularly discreet. We shall be surer
of our ground in time. I set Dettermain and Newson at work. I have
written for them to hire a furnished mansion for a couple of months,
carriages, horses, lacqueys. But over here we must really be--goodness
me! I know how hard it is!--we must hold the reins on ourselves tight.
Baroness Turckems is a most estimable person on the side of her duty.
Why, the Dragon of Wantley sat on its eggs, you may be convinced! She is
a praiseworthy dragon. The side she presents to us is horny, and not so
agreeable. Talk German when she is on guard. Further I need not counsel
a clever old son. Counsel me, Richie. Would it be adviseable to run the
prince down to Riversley?--a Prince!’

‘Oh! decidedly not,’ was my advice.

‘Well, well,’ he assented.

I empowered him to sell out Bank stock.

He wrote word from England of a very successful expedition. The prince,
travelling under the title of Count Delzenburg, had been suitably
entertained, received by Lady Wilts, Serena Marchioness of Edbury, Lady
Denewdney, Lady Sampleman, and others. He had visited my grandfather’s
mine, and that of Miss Penrhys, and was astounded; had said of me that I
wanted but a title to be as brilliant a parti as any in Europe.

The margravine must have received orders from her brother to be civil
to me; she sent me an imperious invitation from her villa, and for this
fruit of my father’s diplomacy I yielded him up my daintier feelings, my
judgement into the bargain.

Snows of early Spring were on the pinewood country I had traversed with
Temple. Ottilia greeted me in health and vivacity. The margravine led
me up to her in the very saloon where Temple, my father, and I had sat
after the finale of the statue scene, saying--

‘Our sea-lieutenant.’

‘It delights me to hear he has turned University student,’ she said; and
in English: ‘You have made friends of your books?’

She was dressed in blue velvet to the throat; the hair was brushed from
the temples and bound in a simple knot. Her face and speech, fair and
unconstrained, had neither shadow nor beam directed specially for me. I
replied,

‘At least I have been taught to despise idleness.’

‘My Professor tells me it is strange for any of your countrymen to love
books.’

‘We have some good scholars, princess.’

‘You have your Bentley and Porson. Oh! I know many of the world’s men
have grown in England. Who can deny that? What we mean is, your society
is not penetrated with learning. But my Professor shall dispute with
you. Now you are facile in our German you can defend yourself. He is a
deep scholar, broad over tongues and dialects, European, Asiatic-a lion
to me, poor little mouse! I am speaking of Herr Professor von Karsteg,
lady aunt.’

‘Speak intelligibly, and don’t drum on my ear with that hybrid
language,’ rejoined the margravine.

‘Hybrid! It is my Herr Professor’s word. But English is the choice
gathering of languages, and honey is hybrid, unless you condemn the bee
to suck at a single flower.’

‘Ha! you strain compliments like the poet Fretzel,’ the margravine
exclaimed. ‘Luckily, they’re not, addressed to human creatures. You will
find the villa dull, Herr Harry Richmond. For my part, every place is
dull to me that your father does not enliven. We receive no company
in the prince’s absence, so we are utterly cut off from fools; we have
simply none about us.’

‘The deprivation is one we are immensely sensible of!’ said the
princess.

‘Laugh on! you will some day be aware of their importance in daily life,
Ottilia.’

The princess answered: ‘If I could hate, it would be such persons.’ A
sentence that hung in the memory of one knowing himself to be animated
by the wildest genius of folly.

We drove to the statue of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth, overlooking
leagues of snow-roofed branches. Again Ottilia reverted to Temple,

‘That dear little friend of yours who wandered out with you to seek your
father, and is now a sailor! I cannot forget him. It strikes me as a
beautiful piece of the heroism of boys. You both crossed the sea to
travel over the whole Continent until you should find him, did you not?
What is hard to understand, is your father’s not writing to you while he
did us the favour to reside at the palace.’

‘Roy is a butterfly,’ said the margravine.

‘That I cannot think.’

‘Roy was busy, he was occupied. I won’t have him abused. Besides, one
can’t be always caressing and cajoling one’s pretty brats.’

‘He is an intensely loving father.’

‘Very well; establish that, and what does it matter whether he wrote or
not? A good reputation is the best vindication.’

The princess smiled. ‘See here, dearest aunty, the two boys passed half
the night here, until my Aennchen’s father gave them shelter.’

‘Apparently he passes half or all the night in the open air everywhere,’
said the margravine.

I glanced hurriedly over both faces. The margravine was snuffing her
nostrils up contemptuously. The princess had vividly reddened. Her face
was luminous over the nest of white fur folding her neck.

‘Yes, I must have the taste for it: for when I was a child,’ said
I, plunging at anything to catch a careless topic, ‘I was out in my
father’s arms through a winter night, and I still look back on it as one
of the most delightful I have ever known. I wish I could describe
the effect it had on me. A track of blood in the snow could not be
brighter.’

The margravine repeated,

‘A track of blood in the snow! My good young man, you have excited forms
of speech.’

I shuddered. Ottilia divined that her burning blush had involved me.
Divination is fiery in the season of blushes, and I, too, fell on the
track of her fair spirit, setting out from the transparent betrayal by
Schwartz of my night-watch in the pine-wood near the Traun river-falls.
My feelings were as if a wave had rolled me helpless to land, at the
margravine’s mercy should she put another question. She startled us with
a loud outburst of laughter.

‘No! no man upon this earth but Roy could have sat that horse I
don’t know how many minutes by the clock, as a figure of bronze,’ she
exclaimed.

Ottilia and I exchanged a grave look. The gentleness of the old time
was sweet to us both: but we had the wish that my father’s extravagant
prominency in it might be forgotten.

At the dinner-table I made the acquaintance of the Herr Professor Dr.
Julius von Karsteg, tutor to the princess, a grey, broad-headed man,
whose chin remained imbedded in his neck-cloth when his eyelids were
raised on a speaker. The first impression of him was, that he was
chiefly neck-cloth, coat-collar, grand head, and gruffness. He had not
joined the ceremonial step from the reception to the dining saloon, but
had shuffled in from a side-door. No one paid him any deference save the
princess. The margravine had the habit of thrumming the table thrice as
soon as she heard his voice: nor was I displeased by such an exhibition
of impatience, considering that he spoke merely for the purpose of
snubbing me. His powers were placed in evidence by her not daring
to utter a sarcasm, which was possibly the main cause of her burning
fretfulness.

I believe there was not a word uttered by me throughout the dinner that
escaped him. Nevertheless, he did his business of catching and worrying
my poor unwary sentences too neatly for me, an admirer of real force and
aptitude, to feel vindictive. I behaved to him like a gentleman, as we
phrase it, and obtained once an encouraging nod from the margravine. She
leaned to me to say, that they were accustomed to think themselves lucky
if no learned talk came on between the Professor and his pupil. The
truth was, that his residence in Sarkeld was an honour to the prince,
and his acceptance of the tutorship a signal condescension, accounted
for by his appreciation of the princess’s intelligence. He was a man
distinguished even in Germany for scholarship, rather notorious for his
political and social opinions too. The margravine, with infinite humour
in her countenance, informed me that he wished to fit the princess for
the dignity of a Doctor of Laws.

‘It says much for her that he has not spoilt her manners; her health,
you know, he succeeded in almost totally destroying, and he is at it
again. The man is, I suspect, at heart arrant Republican. He may teach
a girl whatever nonsensical politics he likes--it goes at the lifting
of the bridegroom’s little finger. We could not permit him to be near a
young prince. Alas! we have none.’

The Professor allowed himself extraordinary liberties with strangers,
the guests of the margravine. I met him crossing an inner court next
day. He interrupted me in the middle of a commonplace remark, and to
this effect:

‘You are either a most fortunate or a most unfortunate young man!’

So profoundly penetrated with thoughtfulness was the tone of his voice
that I could not take umbrage. The attempt to analyze his signification
cost me an aching forehead, perhaps because I knew it too acutely.



CHAPTER XXVIII. OTTILIA

She was on horseback; I on foot, Schwartz for sole witness, and a wide
space of rolling silent white country around us.

We had met in the fall of the winter noon by accident. ‘You like my
Professor?’ said Ottilia.

‘I do: I respect him for his learning.’

‘You forgive him his irony? It is not meant to be personal to you.
England is the object; and partly, I may tell you, it springs from
jealousy. You have such wealth! You embrace half the world: you are such
a little island! All this is wonderful. The bitterness is, you are
such a mindless people--I do but quote to explain my Professor’s ideas.
“Mindless,” he says, “and arrogant, and neither in the material nor in
the spiritual kingdom of noble or gracious stature, and ceasing to have
a brave aspect.” He calls you squat Goths. Can you bear to hear me?’

‘Princess!’

‘And to his conception, you, who were pioneers when the earth had to be
shaped for implements and dug for gold, will turn upon us and stop our
march; you are to be overthrown and left behind, there to gain humility
from the only teacher you can understand--from poverty. Will you defend
yourself?’

‘Well, no, frankly, I will not. The proper defence for a nation is its
history.’

‘For an individual?’

‘For a man, his readiness to abide by his word.’

‘For a woman--what?’

‘For a princess, her ancestry.’

‘Ah! but I spoke of women. There, there is my ground of love for my
Professor! I meet my equals, princes, princesses, and the man, the
woman, is out of them, gone, flown! They are out of the tide of
humanity; they are walking titles, “Now,” says my Professor, “that tide
is the blood of our being; the blood is the life-giver; and to be cut
off from it is to perish.” Our princely houses he esteems as dead wood.
Not near so much say I: yet I hear my equals talk, and I think, “Oh! my
Professor, they testify to your wisdom.” I love him because he has
given my every sense a face-forward attitude (you will complain of my
feebleness of speech) to exterior existence. There is a princely view of
life which is a true one; but it is a false one if it is the sole one.
In your Parliament your House of Commons shows us real princes, your
Throne merely titled ones. I speak what everybody knows, and you, I am
sure, are astonished to hear me.’

‘I am,’ said I.

‘It is owing to my Professor, my mind’s father and mother. They say it
is the pleasure of low-born people to feel themselves princes; mine it
is to share their natural feelings. “For a princess, her ancestry.” Yes;
but for a princess who is no more than princess, her ancestors are a
bundle of faggots, and she, with her mind and heart tied fast to them,
is, at least a good half of her, dead wood. This is our opinion. May I
guess at your thoughts?’

‘It’s more than I could dare to do myself, princess.’

How different from the Ottilia I had known, or could have imagined! That
was one thought.

‘Out of the number, then, this,’ she resumed: ‘you think that your
English young ladies have command over their tongues: is it not so?’

‘There are prattlers among them.’

‘Are they educated strictly?’

‘I know little of them. They seem to me to be educated to conceal their
education.’

‘They reject ideas?’

‘It is uncertain whether they have had the offer.’

Ottilia smiled. ‘Would it be a home in their midst?’

Something moved my soul to lift wings, but the passion sank.

‘I questioned you of English ladies,’ she resumed, ‘because we read your
writings of us. Your kindness to us is that which passes from nurse to
infant; your criticism reminds one of paedagogue and urchin. You make
us sorry for our manners and habits, if they are so bad; but most of
all you are merry at our simplicity. Not only we say what we feel, we
display it. Now, I am so German, this offence is especially mine.’

I touched her horse’s neck, and said, ‘I have not seen it.’

‘Yet you understand me. You know me well. How is that?’

The murmur of honest confession came from me: ‘I have seen it!’

She laughed. ‘I bring you to be German, you see. Could you forsake your
England?’

‘Instantly, though not willingly.’

‘Not regrettingly?’

‘Cheerfully, if I had my work and my--my friend.’

‘No; but well I know a man’s field of labour is his country. You have
your ambition.’

‘Yes, now I have.’

She struck a fir-branch with her riding-whip, scattering flakes on my
head. ‘Would that extinguish it?’

‘In the form of an avalanche perhaps it would.’

‘Then you make your aims a part of your life?’

‘I do.’

‘Then you win! or it is written of you that you never knew failure! So
with me. I set my life upon my aim when I feel that the object is of
true worth. I win, or death hides from me my missing it.

This I look to; this obtains my Professor’s nod, and the approval of my
conscience. Worthiness, however!--the mind must be trained to discern
it. We can err very easily in youth; and to find ourselves shooting at
a false mark uncontrollably must be a cruel thing. I cannot say it is
undeserving the scourge of derision. Do you know yourself? I do not;
and I am told by my Professor that it is the sole subject to which you
should not give a close attention. I can believe him. For who beguiles
so much as Self? Tell her to play, she plays her sweetest. Lurk to
surprise her, and what a serpent she becomes! She is not to be aware
that you are watching her. You have to review her acts, observe her
methods. Always be above her; then by-and-by you catch her hesitating at
cross-roads; then she is bare: you catch her bewailing or exulting; then
she can no longer pretend she is other than she seems. I make self the
feminine, for she is the weaker, and the soul has to purify and raise
her. On that point my Professor and I disagree. Dr. Julius, unlike our
modern Germans, esteems women over men, or it is a further stroke of
his irony. He does not think your English ladies have heads: of us he is
proud as a laurelled poet. Have I talked you dumb?’

‘Princess, you have given me matter to think upon.’

She shook her head, smiling with closed eyelids.

I, now that speech had been summoned to my lips, could not restrain it,
and proceeded, scarcely governing the words, quite without ideas; ‘For
you to be indifferent to rank--yes, you may well be; you have intellect;
you are high above me in both--’ So on, against good taste and common
sense.

She cried: ‘Oh! no compliments from you to me. I will receive them, if
you please, by deputy. Let my Professor hear your immense admiration for
his pupil’s accomplishments. Hear him then in return! He will beat at me
like the rainy West wind on a lily. “See,” he will say, when I am broken
and bespattered, “she is fair, she is stately, is she not!” And really
I feel, at the sound of praise, though I like it, that the opposite,
satire, condemnation, has its good right to pelt me. Look; there is the
tower, there ‘s the statue, and under that line of pine-trees the path
we ran up;--“dear English boys!” as I remember saying to myself; and
what did you say of me?’

Her hand was hanging loose. I grasped it. She drew a sudden long breath,
and murmured, without fretting to disengage herself,

‘My friend, not that!’

Her voice carried an unmistakeable command. I kissed above the fingers
and released them.

‘Are you still able to run?’ said she, leading with an easy canter, face
averted. She put on fresh speed; I was outstripped.

Had she quitted me in anger? Had she parted from me out of view of the
villa windows to make it possible for us to meet accidentally again
in the shadow of her old protecting Warhead, as we named him from his
appearance, gaunt Schwartz?



CHAPTER XXIX. AN EVENING WITH DR. JULIUS VON KARSTEG

In my perplexity, I thought of the Professor’s saying: ‘A most fortunate
or a most unfortunate young man.’ These words began to strike me as
having a prophetic depth that I had not fathomed. I felt myself fast
becoming bound in every limb, every branch of my soul. Ottilia met me
smiling. She moved free as air. She could pursue her studies, and argue
and discuss and quote, keep unclouded eyes, and laugh and play, and be
her whole living self, unfettered, as if the pressure of my hand implied
nothing. Perhaps for that reason I had her pardon. ‘My friend, not
that!’ Her imperishably delicious English rang me awake, and lulled
me asleep. Was it not too securely friendly? Or was it not her natural
voice to the best beloved, bidding him respect her, that we might meet
with the sanction of her trained discretion? The Professor would invite
me to his room after the ‘sleep well’ of the ladies, and I sat with
him much like his pipe-bowl, which burned bright a moment at one sturdy
puff, but generally gave out smoke in fantastical wreaths. He told me
frankly he had a poor idea of my erudition. My fancifulness he commended
as something to be turned to use in writing stories. ‘Give me time, and
I’ll do better things,’ I groaned. He rarely spoke of the princess;
with grave affection always when he did. He was evidently observing me
comprehensively. The result was beyond my guessing.

One night he asked me what my scheme of life was.

On the point of improvizing one of an impressive character, I stopped
and confessed: ‘I have so many that I may say I have none.’ Expecting
reproof, I begged him not to think the worse of me for that.

‘Quite otherwise,’ said he. ‘I have never cared to read deliberately in
the book you open to me, my good young man.’

‘The book, Herr Professor?’

‘Collect your wits. We will call it Shakespeare’s book; or Gothe’s, in
the minor issues. No, not minor, but a narrower volume. You were about
to give me the answer of a hypocrite. Was it not so?’

I admitted it, feeling that it was easily to have been perceived. He was
elated.

‘Good. Then I apprehend that you wait for the shifting of a tide to
carry you on?’

‘I try to strengthen my mind.’

‘So I hear,’ said he dryly.

‘Well, as far as your schools of teaching will allow.’

‘That is, you read and commit to memory, like other young scholars.
Whereunto? Have you no aim? You have, or I am told you are to have,
fabulous wealth--a dragon’s heap. You are one of the main drainpipes of
English gold. What is your object? To spend it?’

‘I shall hope to do good with it.’

‘To do good! There is hardly a prince or millionaire, in history or
alive, who has not in his young days hugged that notion. Pleasure
swarms, he has the pick of his market. You English live for pleasure.’

‘We are the hardest workers in the world.’

‘That you may live for pleasure! Deny it!’

He puffed his tobacco-smoke zealously, and resumed:

‘Yes, you work hard for money. You eat and drink, and boast of your
exercises: they sharpen your appetites. So goes the round. We strive,
we fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your
brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on,
while you remain in a past age, and are proud of it. You reproach us
with lack of common sense, as if the belly were its seat. Now I ask you
whether you have a scheme of life, that I may know whether you are to
be another of those huge human pumpkins called rich men, who cover
your country and drain its blood and intellect--those impoverishers
of nature! Here we have our princes; but they are rulers, they are
responsible, they have their tasks, and if they also run to gourds,
the scandal punishes them and their order, all in seasonable time.
They stand eminent. Do you mark me? They are not a community, and are
not--bad enough! bad enough!--but they are not protected by laws in
their right to do nothing for what they receive. That system is an
invention of the commercial genius and the English.’

‘We have our aristocracy, Herr Professor.’

‘Your nobles are nothing but rich men inflated with empty traditions of
insufferable, because unwarrantable, pride, and drawing, substance from
alliances with the merchant class. Are they your leaders? Do they
lead you in Letters? in the Arts? ay, or in Government? No, not, I am
informed, not even in military service! and there our titled witlings
do manage to hold up their brainless pates. You are all in one mass,
struggling in the stream to get out and lie and wallow and belch on
the banks. You work so hard that you have all but one aim, and that is
fatness and ease!’

‘Pardon me, Herr Professor,’ I interposed, ‘I see your drift. Still
I think we are the only people on earth who have shown mankind a
representation of freedom. And as to our aristocracy, I must, with due
deference to you, maintain that it is widely respected.’

I could not conceive why he went on worrying me in this manner with his
jealous outburst of Continental bile.

‘Widely!’ he repeated. ‘It is widely respected; and you respect it: and
why do you respect it?’

‘We have illustrious names in our aristocracy.’

‘We beat you in illustrious names and in the age of the lines, my good
young man.’

‘But not in a race of nobles who have stood for the country’s
liberties.’

‘So long as it imperilled their own! Any longer?’

‘Well, they have known how to yield. They have helped to build our
Constitution.’

‘Reverence their ancestors, then! The worse for such descendants. But
you have touched the exact stamp of the English mind:--it is, to accept
whatsoever is bequeathed it, without inquiry whether there is any change
in the matter. Nobles in very fact you would not let them be if they
could. Nobles in name, with a remote recommendation to posterity--that
suits you!’

He sat himself up to stuff a fresh bowl of tobacco, while he pursued:
‘Yes, yes: you worship your aristocracy. It is notorious. You have a
sort of sagacity. I am not prepared to contest the statement that you
have a political instinct. Here it is chiefly social. You worship your
so-called aristocracy perforce in order to preserve an ideal of contrast
to the vulgarity of the nation.’

This was downright insolence.

It was intolerable. I jumped on my feet. ‘The weapons I would use
in reply to such remarks I cannot address to you, Herr Professor.
Therefore, excuse me.’

He sent out quick spirts of smoke rolling into big volumes. ‘Nay, my
good young Englishman, but on the other hand you have not answered me.
And hear me: yes, you have shown us a representation of freedom. True.
But you are content with it in a world that moves by computation some
considerable sum upwards of sixty thousand miles an hour.’

‘Not on a fresh journey--a recurring course!’ said I.

‘Good!’ he applauded, and I was flattered.

‘I grant you the physical illustration,’ the Professor continued, and
with a warm gaze on me, I thought. ‘The mind journeys somewhat in
that way, and we in our old Germany hold that the mind advances
notwithstanding. Astronomers condescending to earthly philosophy may
admit that advance in the physical universe is computable, though not
perceptible. Some--whither we tend, shell and spirit. You English,
fighting your little battles of domestic policy, and sneering at us for
flying at higher game, you unimpressionable English, who won’t believe
in the existence of aims that don’t drop on the ground before your eyes,
and squat and stare at you, you assert that man’s labour is completed
when the poor are kept from crying out. Now my question is, have you a
scheme of life consonant with the spirit of modern philosophy--with the
views of intelligent, moral, humane human beings of this period? Or are
you one of your robust English brotherhood worthy of a Caligula in his
prime, lions in gymnastics--for a time; sheep always in the dominions of
mind; and all of one pattern, all in a rut! Favour me with an outline of
your ideas. Pour them out pell-mell, intelligibly or not, no matter. I
undertake to catch you somewhere. I mean to know you, hark you, rather
with your assistance than without it.’

We were deep in the night. I had not a single idea ready for delivery. I
could have told him, that wishing was a good thing, excess of tobacco
a bad, moderation in speech one of the outward evidences of wisdom; but
Ottilia’s master in the Humanities exacted civility from me.

‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘I have few thoughts to communicate at present, Herr
Professor. My German will fail me as soon as I quit common ground. I
love my country, and I do not reckon it as perfect. We are swillers,
possibly gluttons; we have a large prosperous middle class; many good
men are to be found in it.’

His discharges of smoke grew stifling. My advocacy was certainly of a
miserable sort.

‘Yes, Herr Professor, on my way when a boy to this very place I met a
thorough good man.’

Here I related the tale of my encounter with Captain Welsh.

Dr. Julius nodded rapidly for continuations. Further! further!

He refused to dig at the mine within me, and seemed to expect it to
unbosom its riches by explosion.

‘Well, Herr Professor, we have conquered India, and hold it as no other
people could.’

‘Vide the articles in the last file of English newspapers!’ said he.

‘Suppose we boast of it.’

‘Can you?’ he simulated wonderment.

‘Why, surely it’s something!’

‘Something for non-commissioned officers to boast of; not for statesmen.
However, say that you are fit to govern Asiatics. Go on.’

‘I would endeavour to equalize ranks at home, encourage the growth of
ideas...’

‘Supporting a non-celibate clergy, and an intermingled aristocracy? Your
endeavours, my good young man, will lessen like those of the man who
employed a spade to uproot a rock. It wants blasting. Your married
clergy and merchandized aristocracy are coils: they are the ivy about
your social tree: you would resemble Laocoon in the throes, if one could
imagine you anything of a heroic figure. Forward.’

In desperation I exclaimed, ‘It ‘s useless! I have not thought at all.
I have been barely educated. I only know that I do desire with all my
heart to know more, to be of some service.’

‘Now we are at the bottom, then!’ said he.

But I cried, ‘Stay; let me beg you to tell me what you meant by calling
me a most fortunate, or a most unfortunate young man.’

He chuckled over his pipe-stem, ‘Aha!’

‘How am I one or the other?’

‘By the weight of what you carry in your head.’

‘How by the weight?’

He shot a keen look at me. ‘The case, I suspect, is singular, and does
not often happen to a youth. You are fortunate if you have a solid
and adventurous mind: most unfortunate if you are a mere sensational
whipster. There ‘s an explanation that covers the whole. I am as much in
the dark as you are. I do not say which of us two has the convex eye.’

Protesting that I was unable to read riddles, though the heat of the one
in hand made my frame glow, I entreated to have explicit words. He might
be in Ottilia’s confidence, probing me--why not? Any question he chose
to put to me, I said, I was ready to answer.

‘But it’s the questioner who unmasks,’ said he.

‘Are we masked, Herr Professor? I was not aware of it.’

‘Look within, and avoid lying.’

He stood up. ‘My nights,’ he remarked, ‘are not commonly wasted in this
manner. We Germans use the night for work.’

After a struggle to fling myself on his mercy and win his aid or
counsel, I took his hand respectfully, and holding it, said, ‘I am
unable to speak out. I would if it involved myself alone.’

‘Yes, yes, I comprehend; your country breeds honourable men, chivalrous
youngsters,’ he replied. ‘It ‘s not enough--not enough. I want to see a
mental force, energy of brain. If you had that, you might look as high
as you liked for the match for it, with my consent. Do you hear? What I
won’t have is, flat robbery! Mark me, Germany or England, it ‘s one to
me if I see vital powers in the field running to a grand career. It ‘s a
fine field over there. As well there as here, then! But better here than
there if it ‘s to be a wasp’s life. Do you understand me?’

I replied, ‘I think I do, if I may dare to’; and catching breath: ‘Herr
Professor, dear friend, forgive my boldness; grant me time to try me;
don’t judge of me at once; take me for your pupil--am I presumptuous in
asking it?--make of me what you will, what you can; examine me; you may
find there’s more in me than I or anybody may know. I have thoughts and
aims, feeble at present--Good God! I see nothing for me but a choice of
the two--“most unfortunate” seems likeliest. You read at a glance that
I had no other choice. Rather the extremes!--I would rather grasp the
limits of life and be swung to the pits below, be the most unfortunate
of human beings, than never to have aimed at a star. You laugh at me? An
Englishman must be horribly in earnest to talk as I do now. But it is
a star!’ (The image of Ottilia sprang fountain-like into blue night
heavens before my eyes memorably.) ‘She,’ was my next word. I swallowed
it, and with a burning face, petitioned for help in my studies.

To such sight as I had at that instant he appeared laughing
outrageously. It was a composed smile ‘Right,’ he said; ‘you shall have
help in a settled course. Certain Professors, friends of mine, at your
University, will see you through it. Aim your head at a star--your
head!--and even if you miss it you don’t fall. It’s that light dancer,
that gambler, the heart in you, my good young man, which aims itself at
inaccessible heights, and has the fall--somewhat icy to reflect on! Give
that organ full play and you may make sure of a handful of dust. Do you
hear? It’s a mind that wins a mind. That is why I warn you of being most
unfortunate if you are a sensational whipster. Good-night Shut my door
fast that I may not have the trouble to rise.’

I left him with the warm lamplight falling on his forehead, and books
piled and sloped, shut and open; an enviable picture to one in
my condition. The peacefulness it indicated made scholarship seem
beautiful, attainable, I hoped. I had the sense to tell myself that
it would give me unrotting grain, though it should fail of being a
practicable road to my bright star; and when I spurned at consolations
for failure, I could still delight to think that she shone over these
harvests and the reapers.



CHAPTER XXX. A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE

The foregoing conversations with Ottilia and her teacher, hard as they
were for passion to digest, grew luminous on a relapsing heart. Without
apprehending either their exact purport or the characters of the
speakers, I was transformed by them from a state of craving to one of
intense quietude. I thought neither of winning her, nor of aiming to win
her, but of a foothold on the heights she gazed at reverently. And if,
sometimes, seeing and hearing her, I thought, Oh, rarest soul! the wish
was, that brother and sisterhood of spirit might be ours. My other eager
thirstful self I shook off like a thing worn out. Men in my confidence
would have supposed me more rational: I was simply possessed.

My desire was to go into harness, buried in books, and for recreation
to chase visions of original ideas for benefiting mankind. A clear-wined
friend at my elbow, my dear Temple, perhaps, could have hit on the track
of all this mental vagueness, but it is doubtful that he would have
pushed me out of the strange mood, half stupor, half the folding-in of
passion; it was such magical happiness. Not to be awake, yet vividly
sensible; to lie calm and reflect, and only to reflect; be satisfied
with each succeeding hour and the privations of the hour, and, as if in
the depths of a smooth water, to gather fold over patient fold of the
submerged self, safe from wounds; the happiness was not noble, but it
breathed and was harmless, and it gave me rest when the alternative was
folly and bitterness.

Visitors were coming to the palace to meet the prince, on his return
with my father from England. I went back to the University, jealous of
the invasion of my ecstatic calm by new faces, and jealous when there
of the privileges those new faces would enjoy; and then, how my recent
deadness of life cried out against me as worse than a spendthrift, a
destroyer! a nerveless absorbent of the bliss showered on me--the
light of her morning presence when, just before embracing, she made
her obeisance to the margravine, and kindly saluted me, and stooped her
forehead for the baroness to kiss it; her gestures and her voice; her
figure on horseback, with old Warhead following, and I meeting her but
once!--her walk with the Professor, listening to his instructions;
I used to see them walking up and down the cypress path of the villa
garden, her ear given to him wholly as she continued her grave step,
and he shuffling and treading out of his line across hers, or on the
path-borders, and never apologizing, nor she noticing it. At night she
sang, sometimes mountain ditties to the accompaniment of the zither,
leaning on the table and sweeping the wires between snatches of talk.
Nothing haunted me so much as those tones of, her zither, which were
little louder than summer gnats when fireflies are at their brightest
and storm impends.

My father brought horses from England, and a couple of English grooms,
and so busy an air of cheerfulness, that I had, like a sick invalid,
to beg him to keep away from me and prolong unlimitedly his visit to
Sarkeld; the rather so, as he said he had now become indispensable to
the prince besides the margravine. ‘Only no more bronze statues!’ I
adjured him. He nodded. He had hired Count Fretzel’s chateau, in the
immediate neighbourhood, and was absolutely independent, he said. His
lawyers were busy procuring evidence. He had impressed Prince Ernest
with a due appreciation of the wealth of a young English gentleman, by
taking him over my grandfather’s mine.

‘And, Richie, we have advanced him a trifle of thousands for the working
of this coal discovery of his. In six weeks our schooner yacht will be
in the Elbe to offer him entertainment. He graciously deigns to accept
a couple of English hunters at our hands; we shall improve his breed
of horses, I suspect. Now, Richie, have I done well? I flatter myself I
have been attentive to your interests, have I not?’

He hung waiting for confidential communications on my part, but did not
press for them; he preserved an unvarying delicacy in that respect.

‘You have nothing to tell?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I have only to thank you.’

He left me. At no other period of our lives were we so disunited. I felt
in myself the reverse of everything I perceived in him, and such letters
as I wrote to the squire consequently had a homelier tone. It seems
that I wrote of the pleasures of simple living--of living for learning’s
sake. Mr. Peterborough at the same time despatched praises of my
sobriety of behaviour and diligent studiousness, confessing that I began
to outstrip him in some of the higher branches. The squire’s brief reply
breathed satisfaction, but too evidently on the point where he had been
led to misconceive the state of affairs. ‘He wanted to have me near him,
as did another person, whom I appeared to be forgetting; he granted me
another year’s leave of absence, bidding me bluffly not to be a bookworm
and forget I was an Englishman.’ The idea that I was deceiving him never
entered my mind.

I was deceiving everybody, myself in the bargain, as a man must do
when in chase of a woman above him in rank. The chase necessitates
deceit--who knows? chicanery of a sort as well; it brings inevitable
humiliations; such that ever since the commencement of it at speed I
could barely think of my father with comfort, and rarely met him with
pleasure. With what manner of face could I go before the prince or
the margravine, and say, I am an English commoner, the son of a man of
doubtful birth, and I claim the hand of the princess? What contortions
were not in store for these features of mine! Even as affairs stood now,
could I make a confidant of Temple and let him see me through the
stages of the adventure? My jingling of verses, my fretting about
the signification of flowers, and trifling with symbols, haunted me
excrutiatingly, taunting me with I know not what abject vileness of
spirit.

In the midst of these tortures an arrow struck me, in the shape of an
anonymous letter, containing one brief line: ‘The princess is in need of
help.’

I threw my books aside, and repaired to Count Fretzel’s chateau,
from which, happily, my father was absent; but the countenance of the
princess gave me no encouragement to dream I could be of help to her;
yet a second unsigned note worded in a quaint blunt manner, insisted
that it was to me she looked. I chanced to hear the margravine,
addressing Baroness Turckems, say: ‘The princess’s betrothal,’ what
further, escaped me. Soon after, I heard that Prince Otto was a visitor
at the lake-palace. My unknown correspondent plied me a third time.

I pasted the scrap in my neglected book of notes and reflections, where
it had ample space and about equal lucidity. It drew me to the book,
nearly driving me desperate; I was now credulous of anything, except
that the princess cared for help from me. I resolved to go home; I had
no longer any zeal for study. The desolation of the picture of England
in my mind grew congenial. It became imperative that I should go
somewhere, for news arrived of my father’s approach with a French
company of actors, and deafening entertainments were at hand. On the
whole, I thought it decent to finish my course at the University, if I
had not quite lost the power of getting into the heart of books. One who
studies is not being a fool: that is an established truth. I thanked Dr.
Julius for planting it among my recollections. The bone and marrow of
study form the surest antidote to the madness of that light gambler, the
heart, and distasteful as books were, I had gained the habit of
sitting down to them, which was as good as an instinct toward the right
medicine, if it would but work.

On an afternoon of great heat I rode out for a gaze at the lake-palace,
that I chose to fancy might be the last, foreseeing the possibility of
one of my fits of movement coming on me before sunset. My very pulses
throbbed ‘away!’ Transferring the sense of overwhelming heat to my moral
condition, I thought it the despair of silliness to stay baking in that
stagnant place, where the sky did nothing but shine, gave nothing forth.
The sky was bronze, a vast furnace dome. The folds of light and shadow
everywhere were satin-rich; shadows perforce of blackness had light
in them, and the light a sword-like sharpness over their edges. It
was inanimate radiance. The laurels sparkled as with frost-points; the
denser foliage dropped burning brown: a sickly saint’s-ring was round
the heads of the pines. That afternoon the bee hummed of thunder, and
refreshed the ear.

I pitied the horse I rode, and the dog at his heels, but for me the
intensity was inspiriting. Nothing lay in the light, I had the land
to myself. ‘What hurts me?’ I thought. My physical pride was up, and I
looked on the cattle in black corners of the fields, and here and there
a man tumbled anyhow, a wreck of limbs, out of the insupportable glare,
with an even glance. Not an eye was lifted on me.

I saw nothing that moved until a boat shot out of the bight of sultry
lake-water, lying close below the dark promontory where I had drawn
rein. The rower was old Schwartz Warhead. How my gorge rose at the
impartial brute! He was rowing the princess and a young man in uniform
across the lake.

That they should cross from unsheltered paths to close covert was
reasonable conduct at a time when the vertical rays of the sun were
fiery arrow-heads. As soon as they were swallowed in the gloom I sprang
in my saddle with torture, transfixed by one of the coarsest shafts of
hideous jealousy. Off I flew, tearing through dry underwood, and round
the bend of the lake, determined to confront her, wave the man aside,
and have my last word with the false woman. Of the real Ottilia I had
lost conception. Blood was inflamed, brain bare of vision: ‘He takes her
hand, she jumps from the boat; he keeps her hand, she feigns to withdraw
it, all woman to him in her eyes: they pass out of sight.’ A groan burst
from me. I strained my crazy imagination to catch a view of them under
cover of the wood and torture myself trebly, but it was now blank, shut
fast. Sitting bolt upright, panting on horseback in the yellow green
of one of the open woodways, I saw the young officer raise a branch
of chestnut and come out. He walked moodily up to within a yard of my
horse, looked up at me, and with an angry stare that grew to be one of
astonishment, said, ‘Ah? I think I have had the pleasure--somewhere? in
Wurtemberg, if I recollect.’

It was Prince Otto. I dismounted. He stood alone. The spontaneous
question on my lips would have been ‘Where is she?’ but I was unable to
speak a word.

‘English?’ he said, patting the horse’s neck.

‘Yes--the horse? an English hunter. How are you, Prince Otto? Do you
like the look of him?’

‘Immensely. You know we have a passion for English thoroughbreds. Pardon
me, you look as if you had been close on a sunstroke. Do you generally
take rides in this weather?’

‘I was out by chance. If you like him, pray take him; take him. Mount
him and try him. He is yours if you care to have him; if he doesn’t
suit you send him up to Count Fretzel’s. I’ve had riding enough in the
light.’

‘Perhaps you have,’ said he, and hesitated. ‘It’s difficult to resist
the offer of such a horse. If you want to dispose of him, mention it
when we meet again. Shall I try him? I have a slight inclination to go
as hard as you have been going, but he shall have good grooming in the
prince’s stables, and that ‘s less than half as near again as Count
Pretzel’s place; and a horse like this ought not to be out in this
weather, if you will permit me the remark.’

‘No: I’m ashamed of bringing him out, and shan’t look on him with
satisfaction,’ said I. ‘Take him and try him, and then take him from me,
if you don’t mind.’

‘Do you know, I would advise your lying down in the shade awhile?’ he
observed solicitously. ‘I have seen men on the march in Hungary and
Italy. An hour’s rest under cover would have saved them.’

I thanked him.

‘Ice is the thing!’ he ejaculated. ‘I ‘ll ride and have some fetched to
you. Rest here.’

With visible pleasure he swung to the saddle. I saw him fix his cavalry
thighs and bound off as if he meant to take a gate. Had he glanced
behind him he would have fancied that the sun had done its worst. I ran
at full speed down the footpath, mad to think she might have returned
homeward by the lake. The two had parted--why? He this way, she that.
They would not have parted but for a division of the will. I came on
the empty boat. Schwartz lay near it beneath heavy boughs, smoking and
perspiring in peace. Neither of us spoke. And it was now tempered by
a fit of alarm that I renewed my search. So when I beheld her, intense
gratitude broke my passion; when I touched her hand it was trembling for
absolute assurance of her safety. She was leaning against a tree, gazing
on the ground, a white figure in that iron-moted gloom.

‘Otto!’ she cried, shrinking from the touch; but at sight of me, all
softly as a light in the heavens, her face melted in a suffusion of
wavering smiles, and deep colour shot over them, heavenly to see. She
pressed her bosom while I spoke: a lover’s speech, breathless.

‘You love me?’ she said.

‘You have known it!’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘Forgiven me? Speak, princess.’

‘Call me by my name.’

‘My own soul! Ottilia!’

She disengaged her arms tenderly.

‘I have known it by my knowledge of myself,’ she said, breathing with
her lips dissevered. ‘My weakness has come upon me. Yes, I love you. It
is spoken. It is too true. Is it a fate that brings us together when I
have just lost my little remaining strength--all power? You hear me! I
pretend to wisdom, and talk of fate!’

She tried to laugh in scorn of herself, and looked at me with almost a
bitter smile on her features, made beautiful by her soft eyes. I feared
from the helpless hanging of her underlip that she would swoon; a
shudder convulsed her; and at the same time I became aware of the
blotting out of sunlight, and a strange bowing and shore-like noising of
the forest.

‘Do not heed me,’ she said in happy undertones. ‘I think I am going to
cry like a girl. One cannot see one’s pride die like this, without but
it is not anguish of any kind. Since we are here together, I would have
no other change.’

She spoke till the tears came thick.

I told her of the letters I had received, warning me of a trouble
besetting her. They were, perhaps, the excuse for my conduct, if I had
any.

Schwartz burst on us with his drill-sergeant’s shout for the princess.
Standing grey in big rain-drops he was an object of curiosity to us
both. He came to take her orders.

‘The thunder,’ he announced, raising a telegraphic arm, ‘rolls. It
rains. We have a storm. Command me, princess! your highness!’

Ottilia’s eyelids were set blinking by one look aloft. Rain and
lightning filled heaven and earth.

‘Direct us, you!’ she said to me gently.

The natural proposal was to despatch her giant by the direct way down
the lake to fetch a carriage from the stables, or matting from the
boathouse. I mentioned it, but did not press it.

She meditated an instant. ‘I believe I may stay with my beloved?’

Schwartz and I ran to the boat, hauled it on land, and set it keel
upward against a low leafy dripping branch. To this place of shelter,
protecting her as securely as I could, I led the princess, while
Schwartz happed a rough trench around it with one of the sculls. We
started him on foot to do the best thing possible; for the storm gave no
promise that it was a passing one. In truth, I knew that I should have
been the emissary and he the guard; but the storm overhead was not
fuller of its mighty burden than I of mine. I looked on her as mine for
the hour, and well won.



CHAPTER XXXI. PRINCESS OTTILIA’S LETTER

That hour of tempest went swift as one of its flashes over our little
nest of peace, where we crouched like insects. The lightning and the
deluge seemed gloriously endless. Ottilia’s harbouring nook was dry
within an inch of rushing floods and pattered mire. On me the torrents
descended, and her gentle efforts drew me to her side, as with a
maternal claim to protect me, or to perish in my arms if the lightning
found us. We had for prospect an ever-outbursting flame of foliage, and
the hubbub of the hissing lake, crimson, purple, dusky grey, like the
face of a passionate creature scourged. It was useless to speak. Her
lips were shut, but I had the intent kindness of her eyes on me almost
unceasingly.

The good hour slipped away. Old Warhead’s splashed knees on the level of
our heads were seen by us when the thunder had abated. Ottilia prepared
to rise.

‘You shall hear from me,’ she said, bending with brows measuring the
boat-roof, like a bird about to fly.

‘Shall I see you?’

‘Ultimately you surely will. Ah! still be patient.’

‘Am I not? have I not been?’

‘Yes; and can you regret it?’

‘No; but we separate!’

‘Would you have us be two feet high for ever?’ she answered smiling.

‘One foot high, or under earth, if it might be together!’

‘Poor little gnomes!’ said she.

The homeliness of our resting-place arrested her for an instant, and
perhaps a touch of comic pity for things of such diminutive size as to
see nothing but knees where a man stood. Our heads were hidden.

‘Adieu! no pledge is needed,’ she said tenderly.

‘None!’ I replied.

She returned to the upper world with a burning blush.

Schwartz had borne himself with extraordinary discretion by forbearing
to spread alarm at the palace. He saluted his young mistress in the
regulation manner while receiving her beneath a vast umbrella, the
holiday peasant’s invariable companion in these parts. A forester was in
attendance carrying shawls, clogs, and matting. The boat was turned and
launched.

‘Adieu, Harry Richmond. Will you be quite patient till you hear
from me?’ said Ottilia, and added, ‘It is my question!’ delightfully
recalling old times.

I was soon gazing at the track of the boat in rough water.

Shouts were being raised somewhere about the forest, and were replied to
by hearty bellow of the rower’s lungs. She was now at liberty to join
my name to her own or not, as she willed. I had to wait. But how much
richer was I than all the world! The future owed me nothing. I would
have registered a vow to ask nothing of it. Among the many determined
purposes framing which I walked home, was one to obtain a grant of that
bit of land where we had sat together, and build a temple on it. The
fear that it might be trodden by feet of men before I had enclosed it
beset me with anguish. The most absolute pain I suffered sprang from
a bewildering incapacity to conjure up a vision of Ottilia free of
the glittering accessories of her high birth; and that was the pain of
shame; but it came only at intervals, when pride stood too loftily and
the shadow of possible mischance threatened it with the axe.

She did not condemn me to long waiting. Her favourite Aennchen brought
me her first letter. The girl’s face beamed, and had a look as if she
commended me for a worthy deed.

‘An answer, Aennchen?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, yes!’ said she anxiously; ‘but it will take more time than I can
spare.’ She appointed a meeting near the palace garden-gates at night.

I chose a roof of limes to read under.

‘Noblest and best beloved!’ the princess addressed me in her own tongue,
doubting, I perceived, as her training had taught her, that my English
eyes would tolerate apostrophes of open-hearted affection. The rest
was her English confided to a critic who would have good reason to be
merciful:

‘The night has come that writes the chapter of the day. My father has
had his interview with his head-forester to learn what has befallen from
the storm in the forest. All has not been told him! That shall not be
delayed beyond to-morrow.

‘I am hurried to it. And I had the thought that it hung perhaps at
the very end of my life among the coloured leaves, the strokes of
sunset--that then it would be known! or if earlier, distant from this
strange imperative Now. But we have our personal freedom now, and I have
learnt from minutes what I did mean to seek from years, and from our
forest what I hoped that change of scene, travel, experience, would
teach me. Yet I was right in my intention. It was a discreet and a just
meaning I had. For things will not go smoothly for him at once: he will
have his hard battle. He is proved: he has passed his most brave ordeal.
But I! Shall I see him put to it and not certainly know myself? Even
thus I reasoned. One cannot study without knowing that our human nature
is most frail. Daily the body changes, daily the mind--why not the
heart? I did design to travel and converse with various persons.

‘Pardon it to one who knew that she would require super-feminine power
of decision to resolve that she would dispose of herself!

‘I heard of Harry Richmond before I saw him. My curiosity to behold the
two fair boys of the sailor kingdom set me whipping my pony after them
that day so remote, which is always yesterday. My thoughts followed you,
and I wondered--does he mean to be a distinguished countryman of his
Nelson? or a man of learning? Then many an argument with “my Professor,”
 until--for so it will ever be--the weaker creature did succumb in the
open controversy, and thought her thoughts to herself. Contempt of
England gained on me still. But when I lay withered, though so young, by
the sea-shore, his country’s ancient grandeur insisted, and I dreamed
of Harry Richmond, imagining that I had been false to my childhood.
You stood before me, dearest. You were kind: you were strong, and had
a gentle voice. Our souls were caught together on the sea. Do you
recollect my slip in the speaking of Lucy Sibley’s marriage?--“We change
countries.” At that moment I smelt salt air, which would bring you to my
sight and touch were you and I divided let me not think how far.

‘To-morrow I tell the prince, my father, that I am a plighted woman.
Then for us the struggle, for him the grief. I have to look on him and
deal it.

‘I can refer him to Dr. Julius for my estimate of my husband’s worth.

‘“My Professor” was won by it. He once did incline to be the young bold
Englishman’s enemy. “Why is he here? what seeks he among us?” It was
his jealousy, not of the man, but of the nation, which would send one to
break and bear away his carefully cultivated German lily. No eye but his
did read me through. And you endured the trial that was forced on you.
You made no claim for recompense when it was over. No, there is no pure
love but strong love! It belongs to our original elements, and of its
purity should never be question, only of its strength.

‘I could not help you when you were put under scrutiny before the
margravine and the baroness. Help from me would have been the betrayal
of both. The world has accurate eyes, if they are not very penetrating.
The world will see a want of balance immediately, and also too true a
balance, but it will not detect a depth of concord between two souls
that do not show some fretfulness on the surface.

‘So it was considered that in refusing my cousin Otto and other proposed
alliances, I was heart-free. An instructed princess, they thought, was
of the woeful species of woman. You left us: I lost you. I heard you
praised for civil indifference to me--the one great quality you do not
possess! Then it was the fancy of people that I, being very cold, might
be suffered to hear my cousin plead for himself. The majority of our
family favour Otto. He was permitted to woo me as though I had been
a simple maid; and henceforth shall I have pity for all poor little
feminine things who are so persecuted, asked to inflict cruelty--to take
a sword and strike with it. But I--who look on marriage as more than a
surrender--I could well withstand surpassing eloquence. It was easy to
me to be inflexible in speech and will when I stood there, entreated to
change myself. But when came magically the other, who is my heart, my
voice, my mate, the half of me, and broke into illumination of things
long hidden--oh! then did I say to you that it was my weakness had
come upon me? It was my last outcry of self--the “I” expiring. I am now
yours, “We” has long overshadowed “I,” and now engulphs it. We are
one. If it were new to me to find myself interrogating the mind of my
beloved, relying on his courage, taking many proofs of his devotion, I
might pause to re-peruse my words here, without scruple, written. I sign
it, before heaven, your Ottilia.

        ‘OTTILIA FREDERIKA WILHELMINA HEDWIG,
          ‘Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.’



CHAPTER XXXII. AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO

A messenger from Prince Ernest commanding my immediate attendance at the
palace signified that the battle had begun. I could have waited for my
father, whose return from one of his expeditions in the prince’s service
was expected every instant; but though I knew I should have, had a
powerful coadjutor in him to assist me through such a conference, I
preferred to go down alone. Prince Otto met me in the hall. He passed
by, glancing an eye sharply, and said over his shoulder,

‘We shall have a word together presently!’

The library door was flung open. Prince Ernest and the margravine were
in the room. She walked out with angry majesty. The prince held his
figure in the stiff attitude of reception. He could look imposing.

The character of the interview was perceptible at once.

‘You have not, I presume, to be informed of the business in hand, Mr.
Richmond!’

‘Your Highness, I believe I can guess it.’

This started him pacing the floor.

‘An impossibility! a monstrous extravagance! a thing unheard of! mania!
mania!’ he muttered. ‘You are aware, sir, that you have been doing your
worst to destroy the settled arrangements of my family? What does
it mean? In common reason you cannot indulge any legitimate hope of
succeeding. Taking you as a foreigner, you must know that. Judge of the
case by your own reigning Families. Such events never happen amongst
them. Do you suppose that the possession of immense wealth entitles you
to the immeasurable presumption of aspiring to equality of position with
reigning Houses? Such folly is more frequently castigated than
reasoned with. Why, now--now, were it published--that I had
condescended--condescend as I am doing, I should be the laughing-stock
of every Court in Europe. You English want many lessons. You are taught
by your scribes to despise the dignity which is not supported by a
multitude of bayonets, guns, and gold. I heard of it when I travelled
incognito. You make merry over little potentates. Good. But do not cross
their paths. Their dominion may be circumscribed, but they have it; and
where we are now, my power equals that of the Kaiser and the Czar.
You will do me the favour to understand that I am not boasting, not
menacing; I attempt, since it is extraordinarily imposed on me, to
instruct you. I have cause to be offended; I waive it. I meet you on
common ground, and address myself to your good sense. Have you anything
to say?’

‘Much, sir.’

‘Much?’ he said, with affected incredulity.

The painful hardship for me was to reply in the vague terms he had been
pleased to use.

‘I have much to say, your Highness. First, to ask pardon of you, without
excusing myself.’

‘A condition, apparently, that absolves the necessity for the grant.
Speak precisely.’

But I was as careful as he in abstaining from any direct indication of
his daughter’s complicity, and said, ‘I have offended your Highness.
You have done me the honour to suggest that it is owing to my English
training. You will credit my assurance that the offence was not
intentional, not preconceived.’

‘You charge it upon your having been trained among a nation of
shopkeepers?’

‘My countrymen are not illiterate or unmannerly, your Highness.’

‘I have not spoken it; I may add, I do not think it.’

‘I feared that your Highness entertained what I find to be a very
general, perhaps here and there wilful, error with regard to England.’

‘When I was in the service I had a comrade, a gallant gentleman, deeply
beloved by me, and he was an Englishman. He died in the uniform and
under the flag I reverence.’

‘I rejoice that your Highness has had this experience of us. I have to
imagine that I expressed myself badly. My English training certainly
does not preclude the respect due to exalted rank. Your Highness will, I
trust humbly, pardon my offence. I do not excuse myself because I cannot
withdraw, and I am incapable of saying that I regret it.’

‘In cool blood you utter that?’ exclaimed the prince.

His amazement was unfeigned.

‘What are the impossible, monstrous ideas you--where--? Who leads you
to fancy there is one earthly chance for you when you say you cannot
withdraw? Cannot? Are you requested? Are you consulted? It is a question
to be decided in the imperative: you must. What wheel it is you think
you have sufficient vigour to stop, I am profoundly unaware, but I am
prepared to affirm that it is not the wheel of my household. I would
declare it, were I a plain citizen. You are a nullity in the case, in
point of your individual will--a nullity swept away with one wave of the
hand. You can do this, and nothing else: you can apologize, recognize
your station, repair a degree of mischief that I will not say was
preconceived or plotted. So for awhile pursue your studies, your
travels. In time it will give me pleasure to receive you. Mr. Richmond,’
he added, smiling and rising; ‘even the head of a little German
principality has to give numberless audiences.’ His features took a more
cordial smile to convince me that the dismissing sentence was merely
playful.

As for me, my mind was confused by the visible fact that the father’s
features resembled the daughter’s. I mention it, that my mind’s
condition may be understood.

Hardly had I been bowed out of the room when my father embraced me,
and some minutes later I heard Prince Otto talking to me and demanding
answers. That he or any one else should have hostile sentiments toward
a poor devil like me seemed strange. My gift of the horse appeared
to anger him most. I reached the chateau without once looking back,
a dispirited wretch. I shut myself up; I tried to read. The singular
brevity of my interview with the prince, from which I had expected great
if not favourable issues, affected me as though I had been struck by
a cannon shot; my brains were nowhere. His perfect courtesy was
confounding. I was tormented by the delusion that I had behaved
pusillanimously.

My father rushed up to me after dark. Embracing me and holding me by the
hand, he congratulated me with his whole heart. The desire of his life
was accomplished; the thing he had plotted for ages had come to pass.
He praised me infinitely. My glorious future, he said, was to carry a
princess to England and sit among the highest there, the husband of a
lady peerless in beauty and in birth, who, in addition to what she was
able to do for me by way of elevation in my country, could ennoble
in her own territory. I had the option of being the father of English
nobles or of German princes; so forth. I did not like the strain; yet
I clung to him. I was compelled to ask whether he had news of any sort
worth hearing.

‘None,’ said he calmly; ‘none. I have everything to hear, nothing to
relate; and, happily, I can hardly speak for joy.’ He wept.

He guaranteed to have the margravine at the chateau within a week, which
seemed to me a sufficient miracle. The prince, he said, might require
three months of discretionary treatment. Three further months to bring
the family round, and the princess would be mine. ‘But she is yours!
she is yours already!’ he cried authoritatively. ‘She is the reigning
intellect there. I dreaded her very intellect would give us all the
trouble, and behold, it is our ally! The prince lives with an elbow out
of his income. But for me it would be other parts of his person as well,
I assure you, and the world would see such a princely tatterdemalion as
would astonish it. Money to him is important. He must carry on his mine.
He can carry on nothing without my help. By the way, we have to deal out
cheques?’

I assented.

In spite of myself, I caught the contagion of his exuberant happiness
and faith in his genius. The prince had applauded his energetic
management of the affairs of the mine two or three times in my hearing.
It struck me that he had really found his vocation, and would turn the
sneer on those who had called him volatile and reckless. This led me
to a luxurious sense of dependence on him, and I was willing to live on
dreaming and amused, though all around me seemed phantoms, especially
the French troupe, the flower of the Parisian stage: Regnault, Carigny,
Desbarolles, Mesdames Blanche Bignet and Dupertuy, and Mdlle. Jenny
Chassediane, the most spirituelle of Frenchwomen. ‘They are a part of
our enginery, Richie,’ my father said. They proved to be an irresistible
attraction to the margravine. She sent word to my father that she meant
to come on a particular day when, as she evidently knew, I should not
be present. Two or three hours later I had Prince Otto’s cartel in my
hands. Jorian DeWitt, our guest at this season, told me subsequently,
and with the utmost seriousness, that I was largely indebted to Mdlle.
Jenny for a touching French song of a beau chevalier she sang before
Ottilia in my absence. Both he and my father believed in the efficacy of
this kind of enginery, but, as the case happened, the beau chevalier was
down low enough at the moment his highborn lady listened to the song.

It appeared that when Prince Otto met me after my interview with Prince
Ernest, he did his best to provoke a rencontre, and failing to
get anything but a nod from my stunned head, betook himself to my
University. A friendly young fellow there, Eckart vom Hof, offered to
fight him on my behalf, should I think proper to refuse. Eckart and two
or three others made a spirited stand against the aristocratic party
siding with Prince Otto, whose case was that I had played him a
dishonourable trick to laugh at him. I had, in truth, persuaded him
to relieve me at once of horse and rival at the moment when he was
suffering the tortures of a rejection, and I was rushing to take
the hand he coveted; I was so far guilty. But to how great a degree
guiltless, how could I possibly explain to the satisfaction of an angry
man? I had the vision of him leaping on the horse, while I perused his
challenge; saw him fix to the saddle and smile hard, and away to do
me of all services the last he would have performed wittingly. The
situation was exactly of a sort for one of his German phantasy-writers
to image the forest jeering at him as he flew, blind, deaf, and
unreasonable, vehement for one fierce draught of speed. We are all
dogged by the humour of following events when we start on a wind of
passion. I could almost fancy myself an accomplice. I realized the scene
with such intensity in the light running at his heels: it may be quite
true that I laughed in the hearing of his messenger as I folded up the
letter. That was the man’s report. I am not commonly one to be forgetful
of due observances.

The prospect of the possible eternal separation from my beloved pricked
my mechanical wits and set them tracing the consequent line by which I
had been brought to this pass as to a natural result. Had not my
father succeeded in inspiring the idea that I was something more than
something? The tendency of young men is to conceive it for themselves
without assistance; a prolonged puff from the breath of another is
nearly sure to make them mad as kings, and not so pardonably.

I see that I might have acted wisely, and did not; but that is a
speculation taken apart from my capabilities. If a man’s fate were as
a forbidden fruit, detached from him, and in front of him, he might
hesitate fortunately before plucking it; but, as most of us are aware,
the vital half of it lies in the seed-paths he has traversed. We are
sons of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother,
no dead thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul. Nor is it
ever the new man of to-day which grasps his fortune, good or ill. We are
pushed to it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts. And
if you have not the habit of taking counsel with them, you are but an
instrument in their hands.

My English tongue admonishes me that I have fallen upon a tone
resembling one who uplifts the finger of piety in a salon of
conversation. A man’s review of the course of his life grows for a
moment stringently serious when he beholds the stream first broadening
perchance under the light interpenetrating mine just now.

My seconds were young Eckart vom Hof, and the barely much older, though
already famous Gregorius Bandelmeyer, a noted mathematician, a savage
Republican, lean-faced, spectacled, and long, soft-fingered; a cat to
look at, a tiger to touch. Both of them were animated by detestation of
the Imperial uniform. They distrusted my skill in the management of the
weapon I had chosen; for reasons of their own they carried a case of
pistols to the field. Prince Otto was attended by Count Loepel and a
Major Edelsheim of his army, fresh from the garrison fortress of Mainz,
gentlemen perfectly conversant with the laws of the game, which my
worthy comrades were not. Several minutes were spent in an altercation
between Edelsheim and Bandelmeyer. The major might have had an affair
of his own had he pleased. My feelings were concentrated within the
immediate ring where I stood: I can compare them only to those of a
gambler determined to throw his largest stake and abide the issue. I
was not open to any distinct impression of the surrounding scenery; the
hills and leafage seemed to wear an iron aspect. My darling, my saint’s
face was shut up in my heart, and with it a little inaudible cry of love
and pain. The prince declined to listen to apologies. ‘He meant to
teach me that this was not a laughing matter.’ Major Edelsheim had
misunderstood Bandelmeyer; no offer of an apology had been made. A
momentary human sensation of an unworthy sort beset me when I saw
them standing together again, and contrasted the collectedness and
good-humour of my adversary’s representative with the vexatious
and unnecessary naggling of mine, the sight of whose yard-long pipe
scandalized me.

At last the practical word was given. The prince did not reply to my
salute. He was smoking, and kept his cigar in one corner of his mouth,
as if he were a master fencer bidding his pupil to come on. He assumed
that he had to do with a bourgeois Briton unused to arms, such as we
are generally held to be on the Continent. After feeling my wrist for a
while he shook the cigar out of his teeth.

The ‘cliquetis’ of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory, and
yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be accessible to
the music of that thin skeleton’s clank. Nevertheless, it is better and
finer even at the time of action, than the abominable hollow ogre’s eye
of the pistol-muzzle. We exchanged passes, the prince chiefly attacking.
Of all the things to strike my thoughts, can you credit me that the
vividest was the picture of the old woman Temple and I had seen in our
boyhood on the night of the fire dropping askew, like forks of brown
flame, from the burning house in London city; I must have smiled. The
prince cried out in French: ‘Laugh, sir; you shall have it!’ He had
nothing but his impetuosity for an assurance of his promise, and was
never able to force me back beyond a foot. I touched him on the arm and
the shoulder, and finally pierced his arm above the elbow. I could
have done nearly what I liked with him; his skill was that of a common
regimental sabreur.

‘Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis!’ Bandelmeyer sang out.

‘You observed?’ said Major Edelsheim, and received another disconcerting
discharge of a Latin line. The prince frowned and made use of some
military slang. Was his honour now satisfied? Not a whit. He certainly
could not have kept his sword-point straight, and yet he clamoured to
fight on, stamped, and summoned me to assault him, proposed to fight me
with his left hand after his right had failed; in short, he was beside
himself, an example of the predicament of a man who has given all the
provocation and finds himself disabled. My seconds could have stopped
it had they been equal to their duties; instead of which Bandelmeyer,
hearing what he deemed an insult to the order of student and scholar,
retorted furiously and offensively, and Eckart, out of good-fellowship,
joined him, whereat Major Edelsheim, in the act of bandaging the
prince’s arm, warned them that he could not pass by an outrage on
his uniform. Count Loepel stept politely forward, and gave Eckart a
significant bow. The latter remarked mockingly, ‘With pleasure and
condescension!’ At a murmur of the name of doctor from Edelsheim, the
prince damned the doctor until he or I were food for him. Irritated by
the whole scene, and his extravagant vindictiveness, in which light I
regarded the cloak of fury he had flung over the shame of his defeat, I
called to Bandelmeyer to open his case of pistols and offer them for a
settlement. As the proposal came from me, it was found acceptable. The
major remonstrated with the prince, and expressed to me his regrets and
et caeteras of well-meant civility. He had a hard task to keep out of
the hands of Bandelmeyer, who had seized my sword, and wanted vi et
armis to defend the cause of Learning and the People against military
brigands on the spot. If I had not fallen we should have had one or two
other prostrate bodies.

A silly business on all sides.



CHAPTER XXXIII. WHAT CAME OF A SHILLING

The surgeon, who attended us both, loudly admired our mutual delicacy in
sparing arteries and vital organs: but a bullet cuts a rougher pathway
than the neat steel blade, and I was prostrate when the prince came to
press my hand on his departure for his quarters at Laibach. The utterly
unreasonable nature of a duel was manifested by his declaring to me,
that he was now satisfied I did not mean to insult him and then laugh
at him. We must regard it rather as a sudorific for feverish blood and
brains. I felt my wound acutely, seeing his brisk step when he retired.
Having overthrown me bodily, it threw my heart back to its first
emotions, and I yearned to set eyes on my father, with a haunting sense
that I had of late injured him and owed him reparation. It vanished
after he had been in my room an hour, to return when he had quitted it,
and incessantly and inexplicably it went and came in this manner. He was
depressed. I longed for drollery, relieved only by chance allusions to
my beloved one, whereas he could not conceal his wish to turn the stupid
duel to account.

‘Pencil a line to her,’ he entreated me, and dictated his idea of
a moving line, adding urgently, that the crippled letters would be
affecting to her, as to the Great Frederick his last review of his
invalid veterans. ‘Your name--the signature of your name alone, darling
Richie,’ and he traced a crooked scrawl with a forefinger,--“Still,
dearest angel, in contempt of death and blood, I am yours to eternity,
Harry Lepel Richmond, sometimes called Roy--a point for your decision
in the future, should the breath everlastingly devoted to the most
celestial of her sex, continue to animate the frame that would rise on
wings to say adieu! adieu!”--Richie, just a sentence?’

He was distracting.

His natural tenderness and neatness of hand qualified him for spreading
peace in a sick-room; but he was too full of life and his scheme, and
knowing me out of danger, he could not forbear giving his despondency
an outlet. I heard him exclaim in big sighs: ‘Heavens! how near!’ and
again, ‘She must hear of it!’ Never was man so incorrigibly dramatic.

He would walk up to a bookcase and take down a volume, when the
interjectional fit waxed violent, flip the pages, affecting a perplexity
he would assuredly have been struck by had he perused them, and read, as
he did once,--‘Italy, the land of the sun! and she is to be hurried away
there, and we are left to groan. The conspiracy is infamous! One of the
Family takes it upon himself to murder us! and she is to be hurried
out of hearing! And so we are to have the blood of the Roys spilt for
nothing?--no!’ and he shut up the book with a report, and bounded to my
side to beg pardon of me. From his particular abuse of the margravine,
the iteration of certain phrases, which he uttered to denounce and defy
them, I gathered that an interview had passed between the two, and
that she had notified a blockade against all letters addressed to the
princess. He half admitted having rushed to the palace on his road to
me.

‘But, Richie,’ said he, pressing me again to write the moving line, ‘a
letter with a broad black border addressed by me might pass.’ He looked
mournfully astute. ‘The margravine might say to herself, “Here’s Doctor
Death in full diploma come to cure the wench of her infatuation.” I am
but quoting the coarse old woman, Richie; confusion on her and me! for
I like her. It might pass in my handwriting, with a smudge for paternal
grief--it might. “To Her Serene Highness the Margravine of Rippau,
etc., etc., etc., in trust for the Most Exalted the Princess of
Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.” I transpose or omit a title or so. “Aha!” says
she, “there’s verwirrung in Roy’s poor head, poor fellow; the boy has
sunk to a certainty. Here (to the princess), it seems, my dear, this
is for you. Pray do not communicate the contents for a day or so, or a
month.”’

His imitation of the margravine was the pleasantest thing I heard from
him. The princess’s maid and confidante, he regretted to state, was
incorruptible, which I knew. That line of Ottilia’s writing, ‘Violets
are over,’ read by me in view of the root-mountain of the Royal House of
Princes, scoffed at me insufferably whenever my father showed me these
openings of his mind, until I was dragged down to think almost that
I had not loved the woman and noble soul, but only the glorified
princess--the carved gilt frame instead of the divine portrait! a
shameful acrid suspicion, ransacking my conscience with the thrusting in
of a foul torch here and there.

For why had I shunned him of late? How was it that he tortured me now?
Did I in no degree participate in the poignant savour of his scheme?
Such questionings set me flushing in deadly chills. My brain was weak,
my heart exhausted, my body seemed truthful perforce and confessed on
the rack. I could not deny that I had partly, insensibly clung to the
vain glitter of hereditary distinction, my father’s pitfall; taking it
for a substantial foothold, when a young man of wit and sensibility and,
mark you, true pride, would have made it his first care to trample
that under heel. Excellent is pride; but oh! be sure of its foundations
before you go on building monument high. I know nothing to equal the
anguish of an examination of the basis of one’s pride that discovers
it not solidly fixed; an imposing, self-imposing structure, piled upon
empty cellarage. It will inevitably, like a tree striking bad soil,
betray itself at the top with time. And the anguish I speak of will be
the sole healthy sign about you. Whether in the middle of life it is
adviseable to descend the pedestal altogether, I dare not say. Few take
the precaution to build a flight of steps inside--it is not a labour
to be proud of; fewer like to let themselves down in the public eye--it
amounts to a castigation; you must, I fear, remain up there, and accept
your chance in toppling over. But in any case, delude yourself as you
please, your lofty baldness will assuredly be seen with time. Meanwhile,
you cannot escape the internal intimations of your unsoundness. A man’s
pride is the front and headpiece of his character, his soul’s support or
snare. Look to it in youth. I have to thank the interminable hours on
my wretched sick-bed for a singularly beneficial investigation of the
ledger of my deeds and omissions and moral stock. Perhaps it has already
struck you that one who takes the trouble to sit and write his history
for as large a world as he can obtain, and shape his style to harmonize
with every development of his nature, can no longer have much of the
hard grain of pride in him. A proud puppet-showman blowing into
Pandaean pipes is an inconceivable object, except to those who judge of
characteristics from posture.

It began to be observed by others that my father was not the most
comforting of nurses to me. My landlady brought a young girl up to my
room, and introduced her under the name of Lieschen, saying that she had
for a long time been interested in me, and had been diligent in calling
to inquire for news of my condition. Commanded to speak for herself,
this Lieschen coloured and said demurely, ‘I am in service here, sir,
among good-hearted people, who will give me liberty to watch by you, for
three hours of the afternoon and three of the early part of the night,
if you will honour me.’

My father took her shoulder between finger and thumb, and slightly shook
her to each ejaculation of his emphatic ‘No! no! no! no! What! a young
maiden nurse to a convalescent young gentleman! Why, goodness gracious
me! Eh?’

She looked at me softly, and I said I wished her to come.

My father appealed to the sagacity of the matron. So jealous was he of a
suggested partner in his task that he had refused my earnest requests
to have Mr. Peterborough to share the hours of watching by my side. The
visits of college friends and acquaintances were cut very short, he soon
reduced them to talk in a hush with thumbs and nods and eyebrows; and if
it had not been so annoying to me, I could have laughed at his method
of accustoming the regular visitors to make ready, immediately after
greeting, for his affectionate dismissal of them. Lieschen went away
with the mute blessing of his finger on one of her modest dimples; but,
to his amazement, she returned in the evening. He gave her a lecture,
to which she listened attentively, and came again in the morning. He was
petrified. ‘Idiots, insects, women, and the salt sea ocean!’ said he, to
indicate a list of the untameables, without distressing the one present,
and, acknowledging himself beaten, he ruefully accepted his holiday.

The girl was like sweet Spring in my room. She spoke of Sarkeld
familiarly. She was born in that neighbourhood, she informed me, and had
been educated by a dear great lady. Her smile of pleasure on
entering the room one morning, and seeing me dressed and sitting in
a grand-fatherly chair by the breezy window, was like a salutation of
returning health. My father made another stand against the usurper of
his privileges; he refused to go out.

‘Then must I go,’ said Lieschen, ‘for two are not allowed here.’

‘No! don’t leave me,’ I begged of her, and stretched out my hands
for hers, while she gazed sadly from the doorway. He suspected some
foolishness or he was actually jealous. ‘Hum-oh!’ He went forthwith a
murmured groan.

She deceived me by taking her seat in perfect repose.

After smoothing her apron, ‘Now I must go,’ she said.

‘What! to leave me here alone?’

She looked at the clock, and leaned out of the window.

‘Not alone; oh, not alone!’ the girl exclaimed. ‘And please, please do
not mention me--presently. Hark! do you hear wheels? Your heart must
not beat. Now farewell. You will not be alone: at least, so I think. See
what I wear, dear Mr. Patient!’ She drew from her bosom, attached to a
piece of blue ribbon, the half of an English shilling, kissed it, and
blew a soft farewell to me:

She had not been long gone when the Princess Ottilia stood in her place.

A shilling tossed by an English boy to a couple of little foreign girls
in a woodman’s hut!--you would not expect it to withstand the common
fate of silver coins, and preserve mysterious virtues by living
celibate, neither multiplying nor reduced, ultimately to play the part
of a powerful magician in bringing the boy grown man to the feet of an
illustrious lady, and her to his side in sickness, treasonably to the
laws of her station. The little women quarrelled over it, and snatched
and hid and contemplated it in secret, each in her turn, until the
strife it engendered was put an end to by a doughty smith, their
mother’s brother, who divided it into equal halves, through which he
drove a hole, and the pieces being now thrown out of the currency, each
one wore her share of it in her bosom from that time, proudly appeased.
They were not ordinary peasant children, and happily for them they had
another friend that was not a bird of passage, and was endowed by nature
and position to do the work of an angel. She had them educated to read,
write, and knit, and learn pretty manners, and in good season she took
one of the sisters to wait on her own person. The second went, upon
her recommendation, into the household of a Professor of a neighbouring
University. But neither of them abjured her superstitious belief in the
proved merits of the talisman she wore. So when they saw the careless
giver again they remembered him; their gratitude was as fresh as on that
romantic morning of their childhood, and they resolved without concert
to serve him after their own fashion, and quickly spied a way to it.
They were German girls.

You are now enabled to guess more than was known to Ottilia and me of
the curious agency at work to shuffle us together. The doors of her
suite in the palace were barred against letters addressed to the
princess; the delivery of letters to her was interdicted, she
consenting, yet she found one: it lay on the broad walk of the
orange-trees, between the pleasure and the fruit-gardens, as if dropped
by a falcon in mid air. Ottilia beheld it, and started. Her little maid
walking close by, exclaimed, scuttling round in front of her the while
like an urchin in sabots,

‘Ha! what is it? a snake? let me! let me!’ The guileless mistress
replied, ‘A letter!’ Whereupon the maid said: ‘Not a window near! and no
wall neither! Why, dearest princess, we have walked up and down here
a dozen times and not seen it staring at us! Oh, my good heaven!’ The
letter was seized and opened, and Ottilia read:

   ‘He who loves you with his heart has been cruelly used. They have
   shot him. He is not dead. He must not die. He is where he has
   studied since long. He has his medicine and doctors, and they say
   the bullet did not lodge. He has not the sight that cures. Now is
   he, the strong young man, laid helpless at anybody’s mercy.’

She supped at her father’s table, and amused the margravine and him
alternately with cards and a sonata. Before twelve at midnight she was
driving on the road to the University, saying farewell to what her mind
reverenced, so that her lover might but have sight of her. She imagined
I had been assassinated. For a long time, and most pertinaciously,
this idea dwelt with her. I could not dispossess her of it, even after
uttering the word ‘duel’ I know not how often. I had flatly to relate
the whole-of the circumstances.

‘But Otto is no assassin,’ she cried out.

What was that she reverenced? It was what she jeopardized--her state,
her rank, her dignity as princess and daughter of an ancient House,
things typical to her of sovereign duties, and the high seclusion of her
name. To her the escapades of foolish damsels were abominable. The laws
of society as well as of her exalted station were in harmony with her
intelligence. She thought them good, but obeyed them as a subject, not
slavishly: she claimed the right to exercise her trained reason. The
modestest, humblest, sweetest of women, undervaluing nothing that she
possessed, least of all what was due from her to others, she could go
whithersoever her reason directed her, putting anything aside to act
justly according to her light. Nor would she have had cause to repent
had I been the man she held me to be. Even with me she had not behaved
precipitately. My course of probation was severe and long before she
allowed her heart to speak.

Pale from a sleepless night and her heart’s weariful eagerness to be
near me, she sat by my chair, holding my hand, and sometimes looking
into my eyes to find the life reflecting hers as in a sunken well that
has once been a spring. My books and poor bachelor comforts caught her
attention between-whiles. We talked of the day of storm by the lake; we
read the unsigned letter. With her hand in mine I slept some minutes,
and awoke grasping it, doubting and terrified, so great a wave of life
lifted me up.

‘No! you are not gone,’ I sighed.

‘Only come,’ said she.

The nature of the step she had taken began to dawn on me.

‘But when they miss you at the palace? Prince Ernest?’

‘Hush! they have missed me already. It is done.’ She said it smiling.

‘Ottilia, will he take you away?’

‘Us, dear, us.’

‘Can you meet his anger?’

‘Our aunt will be the executioner. We have a day of sweet hours before
she can arrive.’

‘May I see her first?’

‘We will both see her as we are now.’

‘We must have prompt answers for the margravine.’

‘None, Harry. I do not defend myself ever.’

Distant hills, and folds of receding clouds and skies beyond them, were
visible from my window, and beyond the skies I felt her soul.

‘Ottilia, you were going to Italy?’

‘Yes: or whither they please, for as long as they please. I wished once
to go, I have told you why. One of the series’ (she touched the letter
lying on a reading-table beside her) ‘turned the channel of all wishes
and intentions. My friends left me to fall at the mercy of this one.
I consented to the injunction that I should neither write nor receive
letters. Do I argue ill in saying that a trust was implied? Surely it
was a breach of the trust to keep me ignorant of the danger of him I
love! Now they know it. I dared not consult them--not my dear father!
about any design of mine when I had read this odd copybook writing,
all in brief sentences, each beginning “he” and “he.” It struck me like
thrusts of a sword; it illuminated me like lightning. That “he” was the
heart within my heart. The writer must be some clever woman or simple
friend, who feels for us very strongly. My lover assassinated, where
could I be but with him?’

Her little Ann coming in with chocolate and strips of fine white bread
to dip in it stopped my efforts to explain the distinction between an
assassination and a duel. I noticed then the likeness of Aennchen to
Lieschen.

‘She has a sister here,’ said Ottilia; ‘and let her bring Lieschen to
visit me here this afternoon.’

Aennchen, with a blush, murmured, that she heard and would obey. I had a
memorable pleasure in watching my beloved eat and drink under my roof.

The duel remained incomprehensible to her. She first frightened me by
remarking that duels were the pastime of brainless young men. Her next
remark, in answer to my repeated attempts to shield my antagonist from
a capital charge: ‘But only military men and Frenchmen fight duels!’
accompanied by a slightly investigating glance of timid surprise,
gave me pain, together with a flashing apprehension of what she had
forfeited, whom offended, to rush to the succour of a duellist. I had
to repeat to her who my enemy was, so that there should be no further
mention of assassination. Prince Otto’s name seemed to entangle her
understanding completely.

‘Otto! Otto!’ she murmured; ‘he has, I have heard, been obliged by some
so-called laws of honour once or twice to--to--he is above suspicion of
treachery! To my mind it is one and the same, but I would not harshly
exclude the view the world puts on things; and I use the world’s
language in saying that he could not do a dishonourable deed. How far he
honours himself is a question apart. That may be low enough, while the
world is full of a man’s praises.’

She knew the nature of a duel. ‘It is the work of soulless creatures!’
she broke through my stammered explanations with unwonted impatience,
and pressing my hand: ‘Ah! You are safe. I have you still. Do you know,
Harry, I am not yet able to endure accidents and misadventures: I have
not fortitude to meet them, or intelligence to account for them. They
are little ironical laughter. Say we build so high: the lightning
strikes us:--why build at all? The Summer fly is happier. If I had lost
you! I can almost imagine that I should have asked for revenge. For why
should the bravest and purest soul of my worship be snatched away? I am
not talking wisdom, only my shaken self will speak just now! I pardon
Otto, though he has behaved basely.’

‘No, not basely,’ I felt bound to plead on his behalf, thinking, in
spite of a veritable anguish of gathering dread, that she had become
enlightened and would soon take the common view of our case; ‘not
basely. He was excessively irritated, without cause in my opinion;
he simply misunderstood certain matters. Dearest, you have nations
fighting: a war is only an exaggerated form of duelling.’

‘Nations at war are wild beasts,’ she replied. ‘The passions of these
hordes of men are not an example for a living soul. Our souls grow up
to the light: we must keep eye on the light, and look no lower. Nations
appear to me to have no worse than a soiled mirror of themselves in
mobs. They are still uncivilized: they still bear a resemblance to the
old monsters of the mud. Do you not see their claws and fangs, Harry? Do
you find an apology in their acts for intemperate conduct? Men who fight
duels appear in my sight no nobler than the first desperate creatures
spelling the cruel A B C of the passions.’

‘No, nor in mine,’ I assented hastily. ‘We are not perfect. But hear me.
Yes, the passions are cruel. Circumstances however--I mean, there are
social usages--Ay, if one were always looking up t. But should we not be
gentle with our comparisons if we would have our views in proportion?’

She hung studiously silent, and I pursued:

‘I trust you so much as my helper and my friend that I tell you what we
do not usually tell to women--the facts, and the names connected with
them. Sooner or later you would have learnt everything. Beloved, I
do not wait to let you hear it by degrees, to be reconciled to it
piecemeal.’

‘And I forgive him,’ she sighed. ‘I scarcely bring myself to believe
that Harry has bled from Otto’s hand.’

‘It was the accident of the case, Ottilia. We had to meet.’

‘To meet?’

‘There are circumstances when men will not accept apologies;
they--we--heaven knows, I was ready to do all that a man could do to
avoid this folly--wickedness; give it the worst of titles!’

‘It did not occur accidentally?’ she inquired. Her voice sounded
strange, half withheld in the utterance.

‘It occurred,’ said I, feeling my strength ebb and despair set in, ‘it
occurred--the prince compelled me to the meet him.’

‘But my cousin Otto is no assassin?

‘Compelled, I say: that is, he conceived I had injured him, and left me
no other way of making amends.’

Her defence of Otto was in reality the vehement cherishing of her idea
of me. This caused her bewilderment, and like a barrier to the flowing
of her mind it resisted and resisted. She could not suffer herself to
realize that I was one of the brainless young savages, creatures with
claws and fangs.

Her face was unchanged to me. The homeliness of her large mild eyes
embraced me unshadowed, and took me to its inner fire unreservedly.
Leaning in my roomy chair, I contemplated her at leisure while my heart
kept saying ‘Mine! mine!’ to awaken an active belief in its possession.
Her face was like the quiet morning of a winter day when cloud and sun
intermix and make an ardent silver, with lights of blue and faint fresh
rose; and over them the beautiful fold of her full eyebrow on the eyelid
like a bending upper heaven. Those winter mornings are divine. They move
on noiselessly. The earth is still, as if awaiting. A wren warbles,
and flits through the lank drenched brambles; hill-side opens green;
elsewhere is mist, everywhere expectancy. They bear the veiled sun like
a sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of stainless cloud.

She was as fair. Gazing across her shoulder’s gentle depression, I could
have desired to have the couchant brow, and round cheek, and rounding
chin no more than a young man’s dream of woman, a picture alive, without
the animating individual awful mind to judge of me by my acts. I chafed
at the thought that one so young and lovely should meditate on human
affairs at all. She was of an age to be maidenly romantic: our situation
favoured it. But she turned to me, and I was glad of the eyes I knew.
She kissed me on the forehead.

‘Sleep,’ she whispered.

I feigned sleep to catch my happiness about me.

Some disenchanting thunder was coming, I was sure, and I was right. My
father entered.

‘Princess!’ He did amazed and delighted homage, and forthwith
uncontrollably poured out the history of my heroism, a hundred words
for one;--my promptitude in picking the prince’s glove up on my sword’s
point, my fine play with the steel, my scornful magnanimity, the
admiration of my fellow-students;--every line of it; in stupendous
language; an artillery celebration of victory. I tried to stop him.
Ottilia rose, continually assenting, with short affirmatives, to his
glorifying interrogations--a method he had of recapitulating the main
points. She glanced to right and left, as if she felt caged.

‘Is it known?’ I heard her ask, in the half audible strange voice which
had previously made me tremble.

‘Known? I certify to you, princess,’--the unhappy man spouted his
withering fountain of interjections over us anew; known in every Court
and garrison of Germany! Known by this time in Old England! And, what
was more, the correct version of it was known! It was known that the
young Englishman had vanquished his adversary with the small sword, and
had allowed him, because he had raged demoniacally on account of his
lamed limb, to have a shot in revenge.

‘The honour done me by the princess in visiting me is not to be known,’
I summoned energy enough to say.

She shook her head.

My father pledged himself to the hottest secresy, equivalent to a calm
denial of the fact, if necessary.

‘Pray be at no trouble,’ she addressed him.

The ‘Where am I?’ look was painful in her aspect.

It led me to perceive the difference of her published position in
visiting a duellist lover instead of one assassinated. In the latter
case, the rashness of an hereditary virgin princess avowing her
attachment might pass condoned or cloaked by general compassion. How
stood it in the former? I had dragged her down to the duellist’s level!
And as she was not of a nature to practise concealments, and scorned
to sanction them, she was condemned, seeing that concealment as far as
possible was imperative, to suffer bitterly in her own esteem. This, the
cruellest, was the least of the evils. To keep our names disjoined was
hopeless. My weakened frame and mental misery coined tears when thoughts
were needed.

Presently I found the room empty of our poor unconscious tormentor.
Ottilia had fastened her hand to mine again.

‘Be generous,’ I surprised her by saying. ‘Go back at once. I have seen
you! Let my father escort you the road. You will meet the margravine,
or some one. I think, with you, it will be the margravine, and my father
puts her in good humour. Pardon a wretched little scheme to save you
from annoyance! So thus you return within a day, and the margravine,
shelters you. Your name will not be spoken. But go at once, for the sake
of Prince Ernest. I have hurt him already; help me to avoid doing him
a mortal injury. It was Schwartz who drove you? our old Schwartz! Old
Warhead! You see, we may be safe; only every fresh minute adds to the
danger. And another reason for going-another--’

‘Ah!’ she breathed, ‘my Harry will talk himself into a fever.’

‘I shall have it if the margravine comes here.’

‘She shall not be admitted.’

‘Or if I hear her, or hear that she has come! Consent at once, and
revive me. Oh! I am begging you to leave me, and wishing it with all my
soul. Think over what I have done. Do not write to me. I shall see the
compulsion of mere kindness between the lines. You consent. Your wisdom
I never doubt--I doubt my own.’

‘When it is yours you would persuade me to confide in?’ said she, with
some sorrowful archness.

Wits clear as hers could see that I had advised well, except in
proposing my father for escort. It was evidently better that she should
go as she came.

I refrained from asking her what she thought of me now. Suing for
immediate pardon would have been like the applying of a lancet to a vein
for blood: it would have burst forth, meaning mere words coloured by
commiseration, kindness, desperate affection, anything but her soul’s
survey of herself and me; and though I yearned for the comfort passion
could give me, I knew the mind I was dealing with, or, rather, I knew I
was dealing with a mind; and I kept my tongue silent. The talk between
us was of the possible date of my recovery, the hour of her return to
the palace, the writer of the unsigned letters, books we had read
apart or peeped into together. She was a little quicker in speech, less
meditative. My sensitive watchfulness caught no other indication of a
change.

My father drove away an hour in advance of the princess to encounter the
margravine.

‘By,’ said he, rehearsing his exclamation of astonishment and delight at
meeting her, ‘by the most miraculous piece of good fortune conceivable,
dear madam. And now comes the question, since you have condescended
to notice a solitary atom of your acquaintance on the public highroad,
whether I am to have the honour of doubling the freight of your
carriage, or you will deign to embark in mine? But the direction of the
horses’ heads must be reversed, absolutely it must, if your Highness
would repose in a bed to-night. Good. So. And now, at a conversational
trot, we may happen to be overtaken by acquaintances.’

I had no doubt of his drawing on his rarely-abandoned seven-league boots
of jargon, once so delicious to me, for the margravine’s entertainment.
His lack of discernment in treating the princess to it ruined my
patience.

The sisters Aennchen and Lieschen presented themselves a few minutes
before his departure. Lieschen dropped at her feet.

‘My child,’ said the princess, quite maternally, ‘could you be quit
of your service with the Mahrlens for two weeks, think you, to do duty
here?’

‘The Professor grants her six hours out of the twenty-four already,’
said I.

‘To go where?’ she asked, alarmed.

‘To come here.’

‘Here? She knows you? She did not curtsey to you.’

‘Nurses do not usually do that.’

The appearance of both girls was pitiable; but having no suspicion of
the cause for it, I superadded,

‘She was here this morning.’

‘Ah! we owe her more than we were aware of.’

The princess looked on her kindly, though with suspense in the
expression.

‘She told me of my approaching visitor,’ I said.

‘Oh! not told!’ Lieschen burst out.

‘Did you,’--the princess questioned her, and murmured to me, ‘These
children cannot speak falsehoods,’ they shone miserably under the burden
of uprightness ‘did you make sure that I should come?’

Lieschen thought--she supposed. But why? Why did she think and suppose?
What made her anticipate the princess’s arrival? This inveterate why
communicated its terrors to Aennchen, upon whom the princess turned
scrutinizing eyes, saying, ‘You write of me to your sister?’

‘Yes, princess.’

‘And she to you?’

Lieschen answered: ‘Forgive me, your Highness, dearest lady!’

‘You offered yourself here unasked?’

‘Yes, princess.’

‘Have you written to others besides your sister?’

‘Seldom, princess; I do not remember.’

‘You know the obligation of signatures to letters?’

‘Ah!’

‘You have been remiss in not writing to me, child.’

‘Oh, princess! I did not dare to.’

‘You have not written to me?’

‘Ah! princess, how dared I?’

‘Are you speaking truthfully?’

The unhappy girls stood trembling. Ottilia spared them the leap into the
gulfs of confession. Her intuitive glance, assisted by a combination of
minor facts, had read the story of their misdeeds in a minute. She sent
them down to the carriage, suffering her culprits to kiss her fingers;
while she said to one: ‘This might be a fable of a pair of mice.’

When she was gone, after many fits of musing, the signification of it
was revealed to my slower brain. I felt that it could not but be an
additional shock to the regal pride of such a woman that these little
maidens should have been permitted to act forcibly on her destiny.
The mystery of the letters was easily explained as soon as a direct
suspicion fell on one of the girls who lived in my neighbourhood and the
other who was near the princess’s person. Doubtless the revelation of
their effective mouse plot had its humiliating bitterness for her on
a day of heavy oppression, smile at it as she subsequently might. The
torture of heart with which I twisted the meaning of her words about the
pair of mice to imply that the pair had conspired to make a net for an
eagle and had enmeshed her, may have struck a vein of the truth. I could
see no other antithesis to the laudable performance of the single mouse
of fable. Lieschen, when she next appeared in the character of nurse,
met my inquiries by supplicating me to imitate her sister’s generous
mistress, and be merciful.

She remarked by-and-by, of her own accord: ‘Princess Ottilia does not
regret that she had us educated.’

A tender warmth crept round me in thinking that a mind thus lofty
would surely be, however severe in its insight, above regrets and
recantations.



CHAPTER XXXIV. I GAIN A PERCEPTION OF PRINCELY STATE

I had a visit from Prince Ernest, nominally one of congratulation on my
escape. I was never in my life so much at any man’s mercy: he might have
fevered me to death with reproaches, and I expected them on hearing his
name pronounced at the door. I had forgotten the ways of the world. For
some minutes I listened guardedly to his affable talk. My thanks for the
honour done me were awkward, as if they came upon reflection. The prince
was particularly civil and cheerful. His relative, he said, had written
of me in high terms--the very highest, declaring that I was blameless in
the matter, and that, though he had sent the horse back to my stables,
he fully believed in the fine qualities of the animal, and acknowledged
his fault in making it a cause of provocation. To all of which I
assented with easy nods.

‘Your Shakespeare, I think,’ said the prince, ‘has a scene of young
Frenchmen praising their horses. I myself am no stranger to the
enthusiasm: one could not stake life and honour on a nobler brute.
Pardon me if I state my opinion that you young Englishmen of to-day are
sometimes rather overbearing in your assumption of a superior knowledge
of horseflesh. We Germans in the Baltic provinces and in the Austrian
cavalry think we have a right to a remark or two; and if we have not
suborned the testimony of modern history, the value of our Hanoverian
troopers is not unknown to one at least of your Generals. However,
the odds are that you were right and Otto wrong, and he certainly put
himself in the wrong to defend his ground.’

I begged him to pass a lenient sentence upon fiery youth. He assured me
that he remembered his own. Our interchange of courtesies was cordially
commonplace: we walked, as it were, arm-in-arm on thin ice, rivalling
one another’s gentlemanly composure. Satisfied with my discretion, the
prince invited me to the lake-palace, and then a week’s shooting in
Styria to recruit. I thanked him in as clear a voice as I could command:

‘Your Highness, the mine flourishes, I trust?’

‘It does; I think I may say it does,’ he replied. ‘There is always
the want of capital. What can be accomplished, in the present state of
affairs, your father performs, on the whole, well. You smile--but I mean
extraordinarily well. He has, with an accountant at his elbow, really
the genius of management. He serves me busily, and, I repeat, well. A
better employment for him than the direction of Court theatricals?’

‘Undoubtedly it is.’

‘Or than bestriding a bronze horse, personifying my good ancestor! Are
you acquainted with the Chancellor von Redwitz?’

‘All I know of him, sir, is that he is fortunate to enjoy the particular
confidence of his master.’

‘He has a long head. But, now, he is a disappointing man in action;
responsibility overturns him. He is the reverse of Roy, whose advice I
do not take, though I’m glad to set him running. Von Redwitz is in
the town. He shall call on you, and amuse an hour or so of your
convalescence.’

I confessed that I began to feel longings for society.

Prince Ernest was kind enough to quit me without unmasking. I had not
to learn that the simplest visits and observations of ruling princes
signify more than lies on the surface. Interests so highly personal as
theirs demand from them a decent insincerity.

Chancellor von Redwitz called on me, and amused me with secret anecdotes
of all the royal Houses of Germany, amusing chiefly through the
veneration he still entertained for them. The grave senior was doing his
utmost to divert one of my years. The immoralities of blue blood, like
the amours of the Gods, were to his mind tolerable, if not beneficial to
mankind, and he presumed I should find them toothsome. Nay, he besought
me to coincide in his excuses of a widely charming young archduchess,
for whom no estimable husband of a fitting rank could anywhere be
discovered, so she had to be bestowed upon an archducal imbecile; and
hence--and hence--Oh, certainly! Generous youth and benevolent age
joined hands of exoneration over her. The princess of Satteberg actually
married, under covert, a colonel of Uhlans at the age of seventeen;
the marriage was quashed, the colonel vanished, the princess became the
scandalous Duchess of Ilm-Ilm, and was surprised one infamous night in
the outer court of the castle by a soldier on guard, who dragged
her into the guard-room and unveiled her there, and would have been
summarily shot for his pains but for the locket on his breast,
which proved him to be his sovereign’s son.--A perfect romance, Mr.
Chancellor. We will say the soldier son loved a delicate young countess
in attendance on the duchess. The countess spies the locket, takes it to
the duchess, is reprimanded, when behold! the locket opens, and Colonel
von Bein appears as in his blooming youth, in Lancer uniform.--Young
sir, your piece of romance has exaggerated history to caricature.
Romances are the destruction of human interest. The moment you begin to
move the individuals, they are puppets. ‘Nothing but poetry, and I say
it who do not read it’--(Chancellor von Redwitz is the speaker) ‘nothing
but poetry makes romances passable: for poetry is the everlastingly
and embracingly human. Without it your fictions are flat foolishness,
non-nourishing substance--a species of brandy and gruel!--diet for
craving stomachs that can support nothing solider, and must have the
weak stuff stiffened. Talking of poetry, there was an independent
hereditary princess of Leiterstein in love with a poet!--a Leonora
d’Este!--This was no Tasso. Nevertheless, she proposed to come to
nuptials. Good, you observe? I confine myself to the relation of
historical circumstances; in other words, facts; and of good or bad I
know not.’

Chancellor von Redwitz smoothed the black silk stocking of his crossed
leg, and set his bunch of seals and watch-key swinging. He resumed,
entirely to amuse me,

‘The Princess Elizabeth of Leiterstein promised all the qualities which
the most solicitous of paternal princes could desire as a guarantee for
the judicious government of the territory to be bequeathed to her at his
demise. But, as there is no romance to be extracted from her story, I
may as well tell you at once that she did not espouse the poet.’

‘On the contrary, dear Mr. Chancellor, I am interested in the princess.
Proceed, and be as minute as you please.’

‘It is but a commonplace excerpt of secret historical narrative buried
among the archives of the Family, my good Mr. Richmond. The Princess
Elizabeth thoughtlessly pledged her hand to the young sonneteer. Of
course, she could not fulfil her engagement.’

‘Why not?’

‘You see, you are impatient for romance, young gentleman.’

‘Not at all, Mr. Chancellor. I do but ask a question.’

‘You fence. Your question was dictated by impatience.’

‘Yes, for the facts and elucidations!

‘For the romance, that is. You wish me to depict emotions.’

Hereupon this destroyer of temper embrowned his nostrils with snuff,
adding,--‘I am unable to.’

‘Then one is not to learn why the princess could not fulfil her
engagement?’

‘Judged from the point of view of the pretender to the supreme honour
of the splendid alliance, the fault was none of hers. She overlooked his
humble, his peculiarly dubious, birth.’

‘Her father interposed?’

‘No.’

‘The Family?’

‘Quite inefficacious to arrest her determinations.’

‘What then--what was in her way?’

‘Germany.’

‘What?’

‘Great Germany, young gentleman. I should have premised that, besides
mental, she had eminent moral dispositions,--I might term it the
conscience of her illustrious rank. She would have raised the poet to
equal rank beside her had she possessed the power. She could and did
defy the Family, and subdue her worshipping father, the most noble
prince, to a form of paralysis of acquiescence--if I make myself
understood. But she was unsuccessful in her application for the sanction
of the Diet.’

‘The Diet?’

‘The German Diet. Have you not lived among us long enough to know that
the German Diet is the seat of domestic legislation for the princely
Houses of Germany? A prince or a princess may say, “I will this or
that.” The Diet says, “Thou shalt not”; pre-eminently, “Thou shalt not
mix thy blood with that of an impure race, nor with blood of inferiors.”
 Hence, we have it what we see it, a translucent flood down from the
topmost founts of time. So we revere it. “Qua man and woman,” the Diet
says, by implication, “do as you like, marry in the ditches, spawn
plentifully. Qua prince and princess, No! Your nuptials are nought.
Or would you maintain them a legal ceremony, and be bound by them, you
descend, you go forth; you are no reigning sovereign, you are a private
person.” His Serene Highness the prince was thus prohibited from
affording help to his daughter. The princess was reduced to the decision
either that she, the sole child born of him in legal wedlock, would
render him qua prince childless, or that she would--in short, would
have her woman’s way. The sovereignty of Leiterstein continued
uninterruptedly with the elder branch. She was a true princess.’

‘A true woman,’ said I, thinking the sneer weighty.

The Chancellor begged me to recollect that he had warned me there was no
romance to be expected.

I bowed; and bowed during the remainder of the interview.

Chancellor von Redwitz had performed his mission. The hours of my
convalescence were furnished with food for amusement sufficient to
sustain a year’s blockade; I had no further longing for society, but I
craved for fresh air intensely.

Did Ottilia know that this iron law, enforced with the might of a whole
empire, environed her, held her fast from any motion of heart and will?
I could not get to mind that the prince had hinted at the existence
of such a law. Yet why should he have done so? The word impossible,
in which he had not been sparing when he deigned to speak distinctly,
comprised everything. More profitable than shooting empty questions
at the sky was the speculation on his project in receiving me at the
palace, and that was dark. My father, who might now have helped me, was
off on duty again.

I found myself driving into Sarkeld with a sense of a whirlwind round
my head; wheels in multitudes were spinning inside, striking sparks
for thoughts. I met an orderly in hussar uniform of blue and silver,
trotting on his errand. There he was; and whether many were behind him
or he stood for the army in its might, he wore the trappings of an old
princely House that nestled proudly in the bosom of its great jealous
Fatherland. Previously in Sarkeld I had noticed members of the
diminutive army to smile down on them. I saw the princely arms and
colours on various houses and in the windows of shops. Emblems of
a small State, they belonged to the history of the Empire. The
Court-physician passed with a bit of ribbon in his buttonhole. A lady
driving in an open carriage encouraged me to salute her. She was the
wife of the Prince’s Minister of Justice. Upon what foundation had I
been building?

A reflection of the ideas possessing me showed Riversley, my undecorated
home of rough red brick, in the middle of barren heaths. I entered the
palace, I sent my respects to the prince. In return, the hour of dinner
was ceremoniously named to me: ceremony damped the air. I had been
insensible to it before, or so I thought, the weight was now so
crushing. Arms, emblems, colours, liveries, portraits of princes and
princesses of the House, of this the warrior, that the seductress, burst
into sudden light. What had I to do among them?

The presence of the living members of the Family was an extreme physical
relief.

For the moment, beholding Ottilia, I counted her but as one of them. She
welcomed me without restraint.

We chattered pleasantly at the dinner-table.

‘Ah! You missed our French troupe,’ said the margravine.’

‘Yes,’ said I, resigning them to her. She nodded:

‘And one very pretty little woman they had, I can tell you--for a
Frenchwoman.’

‘You thought her pretty? Frenchwomen know what to do with their brains
and their pins, somebody has said.’

‘And exceedingly well said, too. Where is that man Roy? Good things
always remind me of him.’

The question was addressed to no one in particular. The man happened
to be my father, I remembered. A second allusion to him was answered by
Prince Ernest:

‘Roy is off to Croatia to enrol some dozens of cheap workmen. The
strength of those Croats is prodigious, and well looked after they work.
He will be back in three or four or more days.’

‘You have spoilt a good man,’ rejoined the margravine; ‘and that reminds
me of a bad one--a cutthroat. Have you heard of that creature, the
princess’s tutor? Happily cut loose from us, though! He has published a
book--a horror! all against Scripture and Divine right! Is there any one
to defend him now, I should like to ask?’

‘I,’ said Ottilia.

‘Gracious me! you have not read the book?’

‘Right through, dear aunt, with all respect to you.’

‘It ‘s in the house?’

‘It is in my study.’

‘Then I don’t wonder! I don’t wonder!’ the margravine exclaimed.

‘Best hear what the enemy has to say,’ Prince Ernest observed.

‘Excellently argued, papa, supposing that he be an enemy.’

‘An enemy as much as the fox is the enemy of the poultry-yard, and the
hound is the enemy of the fox!’ said the margravine.

‘I take your illustration, auntie,’ said Ottilia. ‘He is the enemy of
chickens, and only does not run before the numbers who bark at him. My
noble old Professor is a resolute truth-seeker: he raises a light to
show you the ground you walk on. How is it that you, adoring heroes as
you do, cannot admire him when he stands alone to support his view of
the truth! I would I were by him! But I am, whenever I hear him abused.’

‘I daresay you discard nothing that the wretch has taught you!’

‘Nothing! nothing!’ said Ottilia, and made my heart live.

The grim and taciturn Baroness Turckems, sitting opposite to her, sighed
audibly.

‘Has the princess been trying to convert you?’ the margravine asked her.

‘Trying? no, madam. Reading? yes.’

‘My good Turckems! you do not get your share of sleep?’

‘It is her Highness the princess who despises sleep.’

‘See there the way with your free-thinkers! They commence by treading
under foot the pleasantest half of life, and then they impose their bad
habits on their victims. Ottilia! Ernest! I do insist upon having lights
extinguished in the child’s apartments by twelve o’clock at midnight.’

‘Twelve o’clock is an extraordinary latitude for children,’ said
Ottilia, smiling.

The prince, with a scarce perceptible degree of emphasis, said,

‘Women born to rule must be held exempt from nursery restrictions.’

Here the conversation opened to let me in. More than once the margravine
informed me that I was not the equal of my father.

‘Why,’ said she, ‘why can’t you undertake this detestable coal-mine, and
let your father disport himself?’

I suggested that it might be because I was not his equal. She
complimented me for inheriting a spark of Roy’s brilliancy.

I fancied there was a conspiracy to force me back from my pretensions by
subjecting me to the contemplation of my bare self and actual condition.
Had there been, I should have suffered from less measured strokes. The
unconcerted design to humiliate inferiors is commonly successfuller than
conspiracy.

The prince invited me to smoke with him, and talked of our gradual
subsidence in England to one broad level of rank through the
intermixture by marriage of our aristocracy, squirearchy, and merchants.

‘Here it is not so,’ he said; ‘and no democratic rageings will make
it so. Rank, with us, is a principle. I suppose you have not read the
Professor’s book? It is powerful--he is a powerful man. It can do
no damage to the minds of persons destined by birth to wield
authority--none, therefore, to the princess. I would say to you--avoid
it. For those who have to carve their way, it is bad. You will enter
your Parliament, of course? There you have a fine career.’

He asked me what I had made of Chancellor von Redwitz.

I perceived that Prince Ernest could be cool and sagacious in repairing
what his imprudence or blindness had left to occur: that he must
have enlightened his daughter as to her actual position, and was most
dexterously and devilishly flattering her worldly good sense by letting
it struggle and grow, instead of opposing her. His appreciation of her
intellect was an idolatry; he really confided in it, I knew; and this
reacted upon her. Did it? My hesitations and doubts, my fantastic
raptures and despair, my loss of the power to appreciate anything at its
right value, revealed the madness of loving a princess.

There were preparations for the arrival of an important visitor.
The margravine spoke of him emphatically. I thought it might be her
farcically pompous way of announcing my father’s return, and looked
pleased, I suppose, for she added, ‘Do you know Prince Hermann? He
spends most of his time in Eberhardstadt. He is cousin of the King, a
wealthy branch; tant soit peu philosophe, a ce qu’on dit; a traveller.
They say he has a South American complexion. I knew him a boy; and his
passion is to put together what Nature has unpieced, bones of fishes
and animals. Il faut passer le temps. He adores the Deluge. Anything
antediluvian excites him. He can tell us the “modes” of those days; and,
if I am not very much misinformed, he still expects us to show him the
very latest of these. Happily my milliner is back from Paris. Ay, and
we have fossils in our neighbourhood, though, on my honour, I don’t know
where--somewhere; the princess can guide him, and you can help at the
excavations. I am told he would go through the crust of earth for the
backbone of an idio--ilio-something-saurus.’

I scrutinized Prince Hermann as rarely my observation had dwelt on any
man. He had the German head, wide, so as seemingly to force out the
ears; honest, ready, interested eyes in conversation; parched lips;
a rather tropically-coloured skin; and decidedly the manners of a
gentleman to all, excepting his retinue of secretaries, valets, and
chasseurs--his ‘blacks,’ he called them. They liked him. One could not
help liking him.

‘You study much?’ he addressed the princess at table.

She answered: ‘I throw aside books, now you have come to open the earth
and the sea.’

From that time the topics started on every occasion were theirs; the
rest of us ran at their heels, giving tongue or not.

To me Prince Hermann was perfectly courteous. He had made English
friends on his travels; he preferred English comrades in adventure to
any other: thought our East Indian empire the most marvellous thing the
world had seen, and our Indian Government cigars very smokeable upon
acquaintance. When stirred, he bubbled with anecdote. ‘Not been there,’
was his reply to the margravine’s tentatives for gossip of this and that
of the German Courts. His museum, hunting, and the Opera absorbed and
divided his hours. I guessed his age to be mounting forty. He seemed
robust; he ate vigorously. Drinking he conscientiously performed as an
accompanying duty, and was flushed after dinner, burning for tobacco and
a couch for his length. Then he talked of the littleness of Europe and
the greatness of Germany; logical postulates fell in collapse before
him. America to America, North and South; India to Europe. India was
for the land with the largest sea-board. Mistress of the Baltic, of the
North Sea and the East, as eventually she must be, Germany would claim
to take India as a matter of course, and find an outlet for the energies
of the most prolific and the toughest of the races of mankind,--the
purest, in fact, the only true race, properly so called, out of India,
to which it would return as to its source, and there create an empire
magnificent in force and solidity, the actual wedding of East and West;
an empire firm on the ground and in the blood of the people, instead
of an empire of aliens, that would bear comparison to a finely fretted
cotton-hung palanquin balanced on an elephant’s back, all depending on
the docility of the elephant (his description of Great Britain’s Indian
Empire). ‘And mind me,’ he said, ‘the masses of India are in character
elephant all over, tail to proboscis! servile till they trample you,
and not so stupid as they look. But you’ve done wonders in India, and
we can’t forget it. Your administration of Justice is worth all your
battles there.’

This was the man: a milder one after the evaporation of his wine in
speech, and peculiarly moderate on his return, exhaling sandal-wood, to
the society of the ladies.

Ottilia danced with Prince Hermann at the grand Ball given in honour of
him. The wives and daughters of the notables present kept up a buzz of
comment on his personal advantages, in which, I heard it said, you saw
his German heart, though he had spent the best years of his life
abroad. Much court was paid to him by the men. Sarkeld visibly expressed
satisfaction. One remark, ‘We shall have his museum in the town!’ left
me no doubt upon the presumed object of his visit: it was uttered and
responded to with a depth of sentiment that showed how lively would
be the general gratitude toward one who should exhilarate the place by
introducing cases of fish-bones.

So little did he think of my presence, that returning from a ride one
day, he seized and detained the princess’s hand. She frowned with pained
surprise, but unresistingly, as became a young gentlewoman’s dignity.
Her hand was rudely caught and kept in the manner of a boisterous
wooer--a Harry the Fifth or lusty Petruchio. She pushed her horse on at
a bound. Prince Hermann rode up head to head with her gallantly,
having now both hands free of the reins, like an Indian spearing
the buffalo--it was buffalo courtship; and his shout of rallying
astonishment at her resistance, ‘What? What?’ rang wildly to heighten
the scene, she leaning constrained on one side and he bending half his
body’s length; a strange scene for me to witness.

They proceeded with old Schwartz at their heels doglike. It became a
question for me whether I should follow in the bitter track, and further
the question whether I could let them escape from sight. They wound up
the roadway, two figures and one following, now dots against the sky,
now a single movement in the valley, now concealed, buried under billows
of forest, making the low noising of the leaves an intolerable whisper
of secresy, and forward I rushed again to see them rounding a belt of
firs or shadowed by rocks, solitary on shorn fields, once more dipping
to the forest, and once more emerging, vanishing. When I had grown sure
of their reappearance from some point of view or other, I spied for them
in vain. My destiny, whatever it might be, fluttered over them; to
see them seemed near the knowing of it, and not to see them, deadly. I
galloped, so intent on the three in the distance, that I did not observe
a horseman face toward me, on the road: it was Prince Hermann. He raised
his hat; I stopped short, and he spoke:

‘Mr. Richmond, permit me to apologize to you. I have to congratulate
you, it appears. I was not aware.--However, the princess has done me the
favour to enlighten me. How you will manage, I can’t guess, but that is
not my affair. I am a man of honour; and, on my honour, I conceived that
I was invited here to decide, as my habit is, on the spot, if I would,
or if I would not. I speak clearly to you, no doubt. There could be no
hesitation in the mind of a man of sense. My way is prompt and blunt;
I am sorry I gave you occasion to reflect on it. There! I have been
deceived--deceived myself, let’s say. Sharp methods play the devil with
you now and then. To speak the truth,--perhaps you won’t care to listen
to it,--family arrangements are the best; take my word for it, they are
the best. And in the case of princesses of the Blood!--Why, look you,
I happen to be suitable. It ‘s a matter of chance, like your height,
complexion, constitution. One is just what one is born to be, eh? You
have your English notions, I my German; but as a man of the world in
the bargain, and “gentleman,” I hope, I should say, that to take a young
princess’s fancy, and drag her from her station is not--of course, you
know that the actual value of the title goes if she steps down? Very
well. But enough said; I thought I was in a clear field. We are used to
having our way cleared for us, nous autres. I will not detain you.’

We saluted gravely, and I rode on at a mechanical pace, discerning by
glimpses the purport of what I had heard, without drawing warmth from
it. The man’s outrageously royal way of wooing, in contempt of minor
presences and flimsy sentiment, made me jealous of him, notwithstanding
his overthrow.

I was in the mood to fall entirely into my father’s hands, as I did
by unbosoming myself to him for the first time since my heart had been
under the charm. Fresh from a rapid course of travel, and with the sense
of laying the prince under weighty obligations, he made light of my
perplexity, and at once delivered himself bluntly: ‘She plights her hand
to you in the presence of our good Peterborough.’ His plans were shaped
on the spot. ‘We start for England the day after to-morrow to urge
on the suit, Richie. Our Peterborough is up at the chateau. The Frau
Feldmarschall honours him with a farewell invitation: you have a private
interview with the princess at midnight in the library, where you are
accustomed to read, as a student of books should, my boy at a touch of
the bell, or mere opening of the door, I see that Peterborough comes to
you. It will not be a ceremony, but a binding of you both by your word
of honour before a ghostly gentleman.’ He informed me that his foresight
had enlisted and detained Peterborough for this particular moment and
identical piece of duty, which seemed possible, and in a singular manner
incited me to make use of Peterborough. For the princess still denied me
the look of love’s intelligence, she avoided me, she still kept to the
riddle, and my delicacy went so far that I was restrained from writing.
I agreed with my father that we could not remain in Germany; but how
could I quit the field and fly to England on such terms? I composed the
flattest letter ever written, requesting the princess to meet me about
midnight in the library, that I might have the satisfaction of taking my
leave of her; and this done, my spirits rose, and it struck me my
father was practically wise, and I looked on Peterborough as an almost
supernatural being. If Ottilia refused to come, at least I should
know my fate. Was I not bound in manly honour to be to some degree
adventurous?

So I reasoned in exclamations, being, to tell truth, tired of seeming to
be what I was not quite, of striving to become what I must have divined
that I never could quite attain to. So my worthier, or ideal, self fell
away from me. I was no longer devoted to be worthy of a woman’s
love, but consenting to the plot to entrap a princess. I was somewhat
influenced, too, by the consideration, which I regarded as a glimpse of
practical wisdom, that Prince Ernest was guilty of cynical astuteness in
retaining me as his guest under manifold disadvantages. Personal pride
stood up in arms, and my father’s exuberant spirits fanned it. He dwelt
loudly on his services to the prince, and his own importance and my
heirship to mighty riches. He made me almost believe that Prince Ernest
hesitated about rejecting me; nor did it appear altogether foolish to
think so, or why was I at the palace? I had no head for reflections.

My father diverted me by levelling the whole battery of his comic
mind upon Peterborough, who had a heap of manuscript, directed against
heretical German theologians, to pack up for publication in his more
congenial country: how different, he ejaculated, from this nest--this
forest of heresy, where pamphlets and critical essays were issued
without let or hindrance, and, as far as he could see, no general
reprobation of the Press, such as would most undoubtedly, with one
voice, hail any strange opinions in our happy land at home! Whether he
really understood the function my father prepared him for, I cannot say.
The invitation to dine and pass a night at the lake-palace flattered him
immensely.

We went up to the chateau to fetch him.

A look of woe was on Peterborough’s countenance when we descended at the
palace portals: he had forgotten his pipe.

‘You shall smoke one of the prince’s,’ my father said. Peterborough
remarked to me,--‘We shall have many things to talk over in England.’

‘No tobacco allowed on the premises at Riversley, I ‘m afraid,’ said I.

He sighed, and bade me jocosely to know that he regarded tobacco as just
one of the consolations of exiles and bachelors.

‘Peterborough, my good friend, you are a hero!’ cried my father. ‘He
divorces tobacco to marry!’

‘Permit me,’ Peterborough interposed, with an ingenuous pretension to
subtle waggery, in itself very comical,--‘permit me; no legitimate union
has taken place between myself and tobacco!’

‘He puts an end to the illegitimate union between himself and tobacco
that he may marry according to form!’ cried my father.

We entered the palace merrily, and presently Peterborough, who had worn
a studious forehead in the midst of his consenting laughter, observed,
‘Well, you know, there is more in that than appears on the surface.’

His sweet simpleton air of profundity convulsed me. I handed my father
the letter addressed to the princess to entrust it to the charge of one
of the domestics, thinking carelessly at the time that Ottilia now stood
free to make appointments and receive communications, and moreover that
I was too proud to condescend to subterfuge, except this minor one, in
consideration for her, of making it appear that my father, and not
I, was in communication with her. My fit of laughter clung. I dressed
chuckling. The margravine was not slow to notice and comment on my
hilarious readiness.

‘Roy,’ she said, ‘you have given your son spirit. One sees he has your
blood when you have been with him an hour.’

‘The season has returned, if your Highness will let it be Spring,’ said
my father.

‘Far fetched!--from the Lower Danube!’ she ejaculated in mock scorn to
excite his sprightliness, and they fell upon a duologue as good as wit
for the occasion.

Prince Hermann had gone. His departure was mentioned with the ordinary
commonplaces of regret. Ottilia was unembarrassed, both in speaking of
him and looking at me. We had the Court physician and his wife at table,
Chancellor von Redwitz and his daughter, and General Happenwyll, chief
of the prince’s contingent, a Prussian at heart, said to be a good
officer on the strength of a military book of some sort that he had
full leisure to compose. The Chancellor’s daughter and Baroness Turckems
enclosed me.

I was questioned by the baroness as to the cause of my father’s
unexpected return. ‘He is generally opportune,’ she remarked.

‘He goes with me to England,’ I said.

‘Oh! he goes,’ said she; and asked why we were honoured with the
presence of Mr. Peterborough that evening. There had always been a
smouldering hostility between her and my father.

To my surprise, the baroness spoke of Ottilia by her name.

‘Ottilia must have mountain air. These late hours destroy her
complexion. Active exercise by day and proper fatigue by night
time--that is my prescription.’

‘The princess,’ I replied, envying Peterborough, who was placed on one
side of her, ‘will benefit, I am sure, from mountain air. Does she read
excessively? The sea--’

‘The sea I pronounce bad for her--unwholesome,’ returned the baroness.
‘It is damp.’

I laughed.

‘Damp,’ she reiterated. ‘The vapours, I am convinced, affect mind
and body. That excursion in the yacht did her infinite mischief. The
mountains restored her. They will again, take my word for it. Now
take you my word for it, they will again. She is not too strong in
constitution, but in order to prescribe accurately one must find out
whether there is seated malady. To ride out in the night instead of
reposing! To drive on and on, and not reappear till the night of the
next day--I ask you, is it sensible? Does it not approach mania?’

‘The princess--?’ said I.

‘Ottilia has done that.’

‘Baroness, can I believe you?--and alone?’

A marvellous twinkle of shuffle appeared in the small slate-coloured
eyes I looked at under their roofing of thick black eyebrows.

‘Alone,’ she said. ‘That is, she was precautious to have her giant to
protect her from violence. There you have a glimmering of reason in her;
and all of it that I can see.’

‘Old Schwartz is a very faithful servant,’ said I, thinking that she
resembled the old Warhead in visage.

‘A dog’s obedience to the master’s whims you call faithfulness! Hem!’
The baroness coughed dryly.

I whispered: ‘Does Prince Ernest--is he aware?’

‘You are aware,’ retorted the baroness, ‘that what a man idolizes he
won’t see flaw in. Remember, I am something here, or I am nothing.’

The enigmatical remark was received by me decorously as a piece of
merited chastisement. Nodding with gravity, I expressed regrets that the
sea did not please her, otherwise I could have offered her a yacht for
a cruise. She nodded stiffly. Her mouth shut up a smile, showing more of
the door than the ray. The dinner, virtually a German supper, ended in
general conversation on political affairs, preceded and supported by a
discussion between the Prussian-hearted General and the Austrian-hearted
margravine. Prince Ernest, true to his view that diplomacy was the
weapon of minor sovereigns, held the balance, with now a foot in one
scale, now in the other; a politic proceeding, so long as the rival
powers passively consent to be weighed.

We trifled with music, made our bow to the ladies, and changed garments
for the smoking-room. Prince Ernest smoked his one cigar among guests.
The General, the Chancellor, and the doctor, knew the signal for
retirement, and rose simultaneously with the discharge of his cigar-end
in sparks on the unlit logwood pile. My father and Mr. Peterborough kept
their chairs.

There was, I felt with relief, no plot, for nothing had been definitely
assented to by me. I received Prince Ernest’s proffer of his hand, on
making my adieux to him, with a passably clear conscience.

I went out to the library. A man came in for orders; I had none to give.
He saw that the shutters were fixed and the curtains down, examined my
hand-lamp, and placed lamps on the reading-desk and mantel-piece. Bronze
busts of sages became my solitary companions. The room was long, low and
dusky, voluminously and richly hung with draperies at the farther end,
where a table stood for the prince to jot down memoranda, and a sofa to
incline him to the relaxation of romance-reading. A door at this end led
to the sleeping apartments of the West wing of the palace. Where I sat
the student had ranges of classical volumes in prospect and classic
heads; no other decoration to the walls. I paced to and fro and should
have flung myself on the sofa but for a heap of books there covered from
dust, perhaps concealed, that the yellow Parisian volumes, of which I
caught sight of some new dozen, might not be an attraction to the eyes
of chance-comers. At the lake-palace the prince frequently gave audience
here. He had said to me, when I stated my wish to read in the library,
‘You keep to the classical department?’ I thought it possible he might
not like the coloured volumes to be inspected; I had no taste for a
perusal of them. I picked up one that fell during my walk, and flung it
back, and disturbed a heap under cover, for more fell, and there I let
them lie.

Ottilia did not keep me waiting.



CHAPTER XXXV. THE SCENE IN THE LAKE-PALACE LIBRARY

I was humming the burden of Gothe’s Zigeunerlied, a favourite one with
me whenever I had too much to think of, or nothing. A low rush of sound
from the hall-doorway swung me on my heel, and I saw her standing with a
silver lamp raised in her right hand to the level of her head, as if she
expected to meet obscurity. A thin blue Indian scarf mufed her throat
and shoulders. Her hair was loosely knotted. The lamp’s full glow
illumined and shadowed her. She was like a statue of Twilight.

I went up to her quickly, and closed the door, saying, ‘You have come’;
my voice was not much above a breath.

She looked distrustfully down the length of the room; ‘You were speaking
to some one?’

‘No.’

‘You were speaking.’

‘To myself, then, I suppose.’

I remembered and repeated the gipsy burden.

She smiled faintly and said it was the hour for Anna and Ursel and Kith
and Liese to be out.

Her hands were gloved, a small matter to tell of.

We heard the portico-sentinel challenged and relieved.

‘Midnight,’ I said.

She replied: ‘You were not definite in your directions about the
minutes.’

‘I feared to name midnight.’

‘Why?’

‘Lest the appointment of midnight--I lose my knowledge of you!--should
make you reflect, frighten you. You see, I am inventing a reason; I
really cannot tell why, if it was not that I hoped to have just those
few minutes more of you. And now they’re gone. I would not have asked
you but that I thought you free to act.’

‘I am.’

‘And you come freely?’

‘A “therefore” belongs to every grant of freedom.’

‘I understand: your judgement was against it.’

‘Be comforted,’ she said; ‘it is your right to bid me come, if you think
fit.’

One of the sofa-volumes fell. She caught her breath; and smiled at her
foolish alarm.

I told her that it was my intention to start for England in the morning;
that this was the only moment I had, and would be the last interview:
my rights, if I possessed any, and I was not aware that I did, I threw
down.

‘You throw down one end of the chain,’ she said.

‘In the name of heaven, then,’ cried I, ‘release yourself.’

She shook her head. ‘That is not my meaning.’

Note the predicament of a lover who has a piece of dishonesty lurking
in him. My chilled self-love had certainly the right to demand the
explanation of her coldness, and I could very well guess that a word
or two drawn from the neighbourhood of the heart would fetch a warmer
current to unlock the ice between us, but feeling the coldness I
complained of to be probably a suspicion, I fixed on the suspicion as a
new and deeper injury done to my loyal love for her, and armed against
that I dared not take an initiative for fear of unexpectedly justifying
it by betraying myself.

Yet, supposing her inclination to have become diverted, I was ready
frankly to release her with one squeeze of hands and take all the pain
of she pain, and I said: ‘Pray, do not speak of chains.’

‘But they exist. Things cannot be undone for us two by words.’

The tremble as of a strung wire in the strenuous pitch of her voice
seemed to say she was not cold, though her gloved hand resting its
finger-ends on the table, her restrained attitude, her very calm eyes,
declared the reverse. This and that sensation beset me in turn.

We shrank oddly from uttering one another’s Christian name. I was the
first with it; my ‘Ottilia!’ brought soon after ‘Harry’ on her lips, and
an atmosphere about us much less Arctic.

‘Ottilia, you have told me you wish me to go to England.’

‘I have.’

‘We shall be friends.’

‘Yes, Harry; we cannot be quite divided; we have that knowledge for our
present happiness.’

‘The happy knowledge that we may have our bone to gnaw when food’s
denied. It is something. One would like possibly, after expulsion out of
Eden, to climb the gates to see how the trees grow there. What I cannot
imagine is the forecasting of any joy in the privilege.’

‘By nature or system, then, you are more impatient than I, for I can,’
said Ottilia. She added: ‘So much of your character I divined early. It
was part of my reason for wishing you to work. You will find that hard
work in England--but why should I preach to you Harry, you have called
me here for some purpose?’

‘I must have detained you already too long.’

‘Time is not the offender. Since I have come, the evil----’

‘Evil? Are not your actions free?’

‘Patience, my friend. The freer my actions, the more am I bound to
deliberate on them. I have the habit of thinking that my deliberations
are not in my sex’s fashion of taking counsel of the nerves and the
blood.

In truth, Harry, I should not have come but for my acknowledgement of
your right to bid me come.’

‘You know, princess, that in honouring me with your attachment, you
imperil your sovereign rank?’

‘I do.’

‘What next?’

‘Except that it is grievously in peril, nothing!’

‘Have you known it all along?’

‘Dimly-scarcely. To some extent I knew it, but it did not stand out in
broad daylight. I have been learning the world’s wisdom recently.
Would you have had me neglect it? Surely much is due to my father? My
relatives have claims on me. Our princely Houses have. My country has.’

‘Oh, princess, if you are pleading----’

‘Can you think that I am?’

The splendour of her high nature burst on me with a shock.

I could have fallen to kiss her feet, and I said indifferently: ‘Not
pleading, only it is evident the claims--I hate myself for bringing
you in antagonism with them. Yes, and I have been learning some worldly
wisdom; I wish for your sake it had not been so late. What made me
overleap the proper estimate of your rank! I can’t tell; but now that I
know better the kind of creature--the man who won your esteem when you
knew less of the world!’--

‘Hush! I have an interest in him, and do not suffer him to be spurned,’
Ottilia checked me. ‘I, too, know him better, and still, if he is
dragged down I am in the dust; if he is abused the shame is mine.’ Her
face bloomed.

Her sweet warmth of colour was transfused through my veins.

‘We shall part in a few minutes. I have a mind to beg a gift of you.’

‘Name it.’

‘That glove.’

She made her hand bare and gave me, not the glove, but the hand.

‘Ah! but this I cannot keep.’

‘Will you have everything spoken?’ she said, in a tone that would have
been reproachful had not tenderness melted it. ‘There should be a spirit
between us, Harry, to spare the task. You do keep it, if you choose.
I have some little dread of being taken for a madwoman, and more--an
actual horror of behaving ungratefully to my generous father. He has
proved that he can be indulgent, most trusting and considerate for his
daughter, though he is a prince; my duty is to show him that I do not
forget I am a princess. I owe my rank allegiance when he forgets his
on my behalf, my friend! You are young. None but an inexperienced girl
hoodwinked by her tricks of intuition, would have dreamed you superior
to the passions of other men. I was blind; I am regretful--take my word
as you do my hand--for no one’s sake but my father’s. You and I are
bound fast; only, help me that the blow may be lighter for him; if I
descend from the place I was born to, let me tell him it is to occupy
one I am fitted for, or should not at least feel my Family’s deep blush
in filling. To be in the midst of life in your foremost England is, in
my imagination, very glorious. Harry, I remember picturing to myself
when I reflected upon your country’s history--perhaps a year after I had
seen the two “young English gentlemen,” that you touch the morning and
evening star, and wear them in your coronet, and walk with the sun West
and East! Child’s imagery; but the impression does not wear off. If I
rail at England, it is the anger of love. I fancy I have good and great
things to speak to the people through you.’

There she stopped. The fervour she repressed in speech threw a glow over
her face, like that on a frosty bare autumn sky after sunset.

I pressed my lips to her hand.

In our silence another of the fatal yellow volumes thumped the floor.

She looked into my eyes and asked,

‘Have we been speaking before a witness?’

So thoroughly had she renovated me, that I accused and reproved the
lurking suspicion with a soft laugh.

‘Beloved! I wish we had been.’

‘If it might be,’ she said, divining me and musing.

‘Why not?’

She stared.

‘How? What do you ask?’

The look on my face alarmed her. I was breathless and colourless,
with the heart of a hawk eyeing his bird--a fox, would be the truer
comparison, but the bird was noble, not one that cowered. Her beauty and
courage lifted me into high air, in spite of myself, and it was a huge
weight of greed that fell away from me when I said,

‘I would not urge it for an instant. Consider--if you had just plighted
your hand in mine before a witness!’

‘My hand is in yours; my word to you is enough.’

‘Enough. My thanks to heaven for it! But consider--a pledge of fidelity
that should be my secret angel about me in trouble and trial; my wedded
soul! She cannot falter, she is mine for ever, she guides me, holds me
to work, inspirits me!--she is secure from temptation, from threats,
from everything--nothing can touch, nothing move her, she is mine! I
mean, an attested word, a form, that is--a betrothal. For me to
say--my beloved and my betrothed! You hear that? Beloved! is a lonely
word:--betrothed! carries us joined up to death. Would you?--I do but
ask to know that you would. To-morrow I am loose in the world, and there
‘s a darkness in the thought of it almost too terrible. Would you?--one
sworn word that gives me my bride, let men do what they may! I go then
singing to battle--sure!--Remember, it is but the question whether you
would.’

‘Harry, I would, and will,’ she said, her lips shuddering--‘wait’--for
a cry of joy escaped me--‘I will look you me in the eyes and tell me you
have a doubt of me.’

I looked: she swam in a mist.

We had our full draught of the divine self-oblivion which floated
those ghosts of the two immortal lovers through the bounds of their
purgatorial circle, and for us to whom the minutes were ages, as for
them to whom all time was unmarked, the power of supreme love swept
out circumstance. Such embraces cast the soul beyond happiness, into no
known region of sadness, but we drew apart sadly, even as that involved
pair of bleeding recollections looked on the life lost to them. I knew
well what a height she dropped from when the senses took fire. She
raised me to learn how little of fretful thirst and its reputed voracity
remains with love when it has been met midway in air by a winged mate
able to sustain, unable to descend farther.

And it was before a witness, though unviewed by us.

The farewell had come. Her voice was humbled.

Never, I said, delighting in the now conscious bravery of her eyes
engaging mine, shadowy with the struggle, I would never doubt her, and I
renounced all pledges. To be clear in my own sight as well as in hers, I
made mention of the half-formed conspiracy to obtain her plighted troth
in a binding manner. It was not necessary for me to excuse myself;
she did that, saying, ‘Could there be a greater proof of my darling’s
unhappiness? I am to blame.’

We closed hands for parting. She hesitated and asked if my father was
awake; then promptly to my answer:

‘I will see him. I have treated you ill. I have exacted too much
patience. The suspicion was owing to a warning I had this evening,
Harry; a silly warning to beware of snares; and I had no fear of them,
believe me, though for some moments, and without the slightest real
desire to be guarded, I fancied Harry’s father was overhearing me. He is
your father, dearest: fetch him to me. My father will hear of this from
my lips--why not he? Ah! did I suspect you ever so little? I will atone
for it; not atone, I will make it my pleasure; it is my pride that has
hurt you both. O my lover! my lover! Dear head, dear eyes! Delicate
and noble that you are! my own stronger soul! Where was my heart? Is it
sometimes dead, or sleeping? But you can touch it to life. Look at me--I
am yours. I consent, I desire it; I will see him. I will be bound. The
heavier the chains, oh! the better for me. What am I, to be proud of
anything not yours, Harry? and I that have passed over to you! I will
see him at once.’

A third in the room cried out, ‘No, not that--you do not!’

The tongue was German and struck on us like a roll of unfriendly
musketry before we perceived the enemy. ‘Princess Ottilia! you remember
your dignity or I defend you and it, think of me what you will!’

Baroness Turckems, desperately entangled by the sofa-covering, rushed
into the ray of the lamps and laid her hand on the bell-rope. In a
minute we had an alarm sounding, my father was among us, there was a mad
play of chatter, and we stood in the strangest nightmare-light that ever
ended an interview of lovers.



CHAPTER XXXVI. HOMEWARD AND HOME AGAIN

The room was in flames, Baroness Turckems plucking at the bell-rope, my
father looking big and brilliant.

‘Hold hand!’ he shouted to the frenzied baroness.

She counter-shouted; both of them stamped feet; the portico sentinel
struck the butt of his musket on the hall-doors; bell answered bell
along the upper galleries.

‘Foolish woman, be silent!’ cried my father.

‘Incendiary!’ she half-shrieked.

He turned to the princess, begging her to retire, but she stared at him,
and I too, after having seen him deliberately apply the flame of her
lamp to the curtains, deemed him mad. He was perfectly self-possessed,
and said, ‘This will explain the bell!’ and fetched a deep breath, and
again urged the princess to retire.

Peterborough was the only one present who bethought him of doing
fireman’s duty. The risk looked greater than it was. He had but to tear
the lighted curtains down and trample on them. Suddenly the baroness
called out, ‘The man is right! Come with me, princess; escape, your
Highness, escape! And you,’ she addressed me--‘you rang the bell, you!’

‘To repair your error, baroness,’ said my father.

‘I have my conscience pure; have you?’ she retorted.

He bowed and said, ‘The fire will also excuse your presence on the spot,
baroness.’

‘I thank my God I am not so cool as you,’ said she.

‘Your warmth’--he bent to her--‘shall always be your apology, baroness.’

Seeing the curtains extinguished, Ottilia withdrew. She gave me no
glance.

All this occurred before the night-porter, who was going his rounds,
could reach the library. Lacqueys and maids were soon at his heels.
My father met Prince Ernest with a florid story of a reckless student,
either asleep or too anxious to secure a particular volume, and showed
his usual consideration by not asking me to verify the narrative. With
that, and with high praise of Peterborough, as to whose gallantry
I heard him deliver a very circumstantial account, he, I suppose,
satisfied the prince’s curiosity, and appeased him, the damage being
small compared with the uproar. Prince Ernest questioned two or three
times, ‘What set him ringing so furiously?’ My father made some reply.

Ottilia’s cloud-pale windows were the sole greeting I had from her on my
departure early next morning, far wretcheder than if I had encountered a
misfortune. It was impossible for me to deny that my father had shielded
the princess: she would never have run for a menace. As he remarked, the
ringing of the bell would not of itself have forced her to retreat,
and the nature of the baroness’s alarm demanded nothing less than a
conflagration to account for it to the household. But I felt humiliated
on Ottilia’s behalf, and enraged on my own. And I had, I must confess, a
touch of fear of a man who could unhesitatingly go to extremities, as
he had done, by summoning fire to the rescue. He assured me that moments
such as those inspired him and were the pride of his life, and he
was convinced that, upon reflection, ‘I should rise to his pitch.’ He
deluded himself with the idea of his having foiled Baroness Turckems,
nor did I choose to contest it, though it struck me that she was too
conclusively the foiler. She must have intercepted the letter for the
princess. I remembered acting carelessly in handing it to my father for
him to consign it to one of the domestics, and he passed it on with a
flourish. Her place of concealment was singularly well selected under
the sofa-cover, and the little heaps of paper-bound volumes. I do not
fancy she meant to rouse the household; her notion probably was to
terrorize the princess, that she might compel her to quit my presence.
In rushing to the bell-rope, her impetuosity sent her stumbling on
it with force, and while threatening to ring, and meaning merely to
threaten, she rang; and as it was not a retractable act, she continued
ringing, and the more violently upon my father’s appearance. Catching
sight of Peterborough at his heels, she screamed a word equivalent to a
clergyman. She had lost her discretion, but not her wits.

For any one save a lover--thwarted as I was, and perturbed by the shadow
falling on the princess--my father’s Aplomb and promptness in conjuring
a check to what he assumed to be a premeditated piece of villany on
the part of Baroness Turckems, might have seemed tolerably worthy of
admiration. Me the whole scene affected as if it had burnt my skin. I
loathed that picture of him, constantly present to me, of his shivering
the glass of Ottilia’s semi-classical night-lamp, gravely asking her
pardon, and stretching the flame to the curtain, with large eyes blazing
on the baroness. The stupid burlesque majesty of it was unendurable to
thought. Nevertheless, I had to thank him for shielding Ottilia, and I
had to brood on the fact that I had drawn her into a situation requiring
such a shield. He, meanwhile, according to his habit, was engaged in
reviewing the triumphs to come. ‘We have won a princess!’ And what
England would say, how England would look, when, on a further journey,
I brought my princess home, entirely occupied his imagination, to my
excessive torture--a state of mind for which it was impossible to ask
his mercy. His sole link with the past appeared to be this notion that
he had planned all the good things in store for us. Consequently I was
condemned to hear of the success of the plot, until--for I had not the
best of consciences--I felt my hand would be spell-bound in the attempt
to write to the princess; and with that sense of incapacity I seemed to
be cut loose from her, drifting back into the desolate days before I
saw her wheeled in her invalid chair along the sands and my life knew
sunrise.

But whatever the mood of our affections, so it is with us island
wanderers: we cannot gaze over at England, knowing the old country to be
close under the sea-line, and not hail it, and partly forget ourselves
in the time that was. The smell of sea-air made me long for the white
cliffs, the sight of the white cliffs revived pleasant thoughts of
Riversley, and thoughts of Riversley thoughts of Janet, which were
singularly and refreshingly free from self-accusations. Some love for my
home, similar to what one may have for Winter, came across me, and some
appreciation of Janet as well, in whose society was sure to be at least
myself, a creature much reduced in altitude, but without the cramped
sensations of a man on a monument. My hearty Janet! I thanked her then
for seeing me of my natural height.

Some hours after parting with my father in London, I lay down to sleep
in my old home, feeling as if I had thrown off a coat of armour. I awoke
with a sailor’s song on my lips. Looking out of window at the well-known
features of the heaths and dark firs, and waning oak copses, and the
shadowy line of the downs stretching their long whale backs South to
West, it struck me that I had been barely alive of late. Indeed one who
consents to live as I had done, in a hope and a retrospect, will find
his life slipping between the two, like the ships under the striding
Colossus. I shook myself, braced myself, and saluted every one at the
breakfast table with the frankness of Harry Richmond. Congratulated on
my splendid spirits, I was confirmed in the idea that I enjoyed them,
though I knew of something hollow which sent an echo through me at
intervals. Janet had become a fixed inmate of the house. ‘I’ve bought
her, and I shall keep her; she’s the apple of my eye,’ said the squire,
adding with characteristic scrupulousness, ‘if apple’s female.’ I
asked her whether she had heard from Temple latterly. ‘No; dear little
fellow!’ cried she, and I saw in a twinkling what it was that the squire
liked in her, and liked it too. I caught sight of myself, as through
a rift of cloud, trotting home from the hunt to a glad, frank,
unpretending mate, with just enough of understanding to look up to
mine. For a second or so it was pleasing, as a glance out of his library
across hill and dale will be to a strained student. Our familiarity
sanctioned a comment on the growth of her daughter-of-the-regiment
moustache, the faintest conceivable suggestion of a shadow on her soft
upper lip, which a poet might have feigned to have fallen from her dark
thick eyebrows.

‘Why, you don’t mean to say, Hal, it’s not to your taste?’ said the
squire.

‘No,’ said I, turning an eye on my aunt Dorothy, ‘I’ve loved it all my
life.’

The squire stared at me to make sure of this, muttered that it was to
his mind a beauty, and that it was nothing more on Janet’s lip than down
on a flower, bloom on a plum. The poetical comparisons had the effect
of causing me to examine her critically. She did not raise a spark of
poetical sentiment in my bosom. She had grown a tall young woman, firmly
built, light of motion, graceful perhaps; but it was not the grace
of grace: the grace of simplicity, rather. She talked vivaciously and
frankly, and gave (to friends) her whole eyes and a fine animation in
talking; and her voice was a delight to friends; there was always the
full ring of Janet in it, and music also. She still lifted her lip when
she expressed contempt or dislike of persons; nor was she cured of her
trick of frowning. She was as ready as ever to be flattered; that was
evident. My grandfather’s praise of her she received with a rewarding
look back of kindness; she was not discomposed by flattery, and threw
herself into no postures, nor blushed very deeply. ‘Thank you for
perceiving my merits,’ she seemed to say; and to be just I should add
that one could fancy her saying, you see them because you love me. She
wore her hair in a plain knot, peculiarly neatly rounded away from
the temples, which sometimes gave to a face not aquiline a look of
swiftness. The face was mobile, various, not at all suggestive of bad
temper, in spite of her frowns. The profile of it was less assuring than
the front, because of the dark eyebrows’ extension and the occasional
frown, but that was not shared by the mouth, which was, I admitted to
myself, a charming bow, running to a length at the corners like her
eyebrows, quick with smiles. The corners of the mouth would often be in
movement, setting dimples at work in her cheek, while the brows remained
fixed, and thus at times a tender meditative air was given her that I
could not think her own. Upon what could she possibly reflect? She had
not a care, she had no education, she could hardly boast an idea--two
at a time I was sure she never had entertained. The sort of wife for a
fox-hunting lord, I summed up, and hoped he would be a good fellow.

Peterborough was plied by the squire for a description of German women.
Blushing and shooting a timid look from under his pendulous eyelids
at my aunt, indicating that he was prepared to go the way of tutors at
Riversley, he said he really had not much observed them.

‘They’re a whitey-brown sort of women, aren’t they?’ the squire
questioned him, ‘with tow hair and fish eyes, high o’ the shoulder,
bony, and a towel skin and gone teeth, so I’ve heard tell. I’ve heard
that’s why the men have all taken to their beastly smoking.’

Peterborough ejaculated: ‘Indeed! sir, really!’ He assured my aunt
that German ladies were most agreeable, cultivated persons, extremely
domesticated, retiring; the encomiums of the Roman historian were as
well deserved by them in the present day as they had been in the past;
decidedly, on the whole, Peterborough would call them a virtuous race.

‘Why do they let the men smoke, then?’ said the squire. ‘A pretty
style o’ courtship. Come, sit by my hearth, ma’am; I ‘ll be your
chimney--faugh! dirty rascals!’

Janet said: ‘I rather like the smell of cigars.’

‘Like what you please, my dear--he’ll be a lucky dog,’ the squire
approved her promptly, and asked me if I smoked.

I was not a stranger to the act, I confessed.

‘Well’--he took refuge in practical philosophy--‘a man must bring some
dirt home from every journey: only don’t smoke me out, mercy’s sake.’

Here was a hint of Janet’s influence with him, and of what he expected
from my return to Riversley.

Peterborough informed me that he suffered persecution over the last
glasses of Port in the evening, through the squire’s persistent
inquiries as to whether a woman had anything to do with my staying so
long abroad. ‘A lady, sir?’ quoth Peterborough. ‘Lady, if you like,’
rejoined the squire. ‘You parsons and petticoats must always mince the
meat to hash the fact.’ Peterborough defended his young friend Harry’s
moral reputation, and was amazed to hear that the squire did not think
highly of a man’s chastity. The squire acutely chagrined the sensitive
gentleman by drawling the word after him, and declaring that he tossed
that kind of thing into the women’s wash-basket. Peterborough,
not without signs of indignation, protesting, the squire asked him
point-blank if he supposed that Old England had been raised to the head
of the world by such as he. In fine, he favoured Peterborough with a
lesson in worldly views. ‘But these,’ Peterborough said to me, ‘are
not the views, dear Harry--if they are the views of ladies of any
description, which I take leave to doubt--not the views of the ladies
you and I would esteem. For instance, the ladies of this household.’ My
aunt Dorothy’s fate was plain.

In reply to my grandfather’s renewed demand to know whether any one
of those High-Dutch women had got hold of me, Peterborough said: ‘Mr.
Beltham, the only lady of whom it could be suspected that my
friend Harry regarded her with more than ordinary admiration was
Hereditary-Princess of one of the ancient princely Houses of Germany.’
My grandfather thereupon said, ‘Oh!’ pushed the wine, and was stopped.

Peterborough chuckled over this ‘Oh!’ and the stoppage of further
questions, while acknowledging that the luxury of a pipe would help to
make him more charitable. He enjoyed the Port of his native land, but he
did, likewise, feel the want of one whiff or so of the less restrictive
foreigner’s pipe; and he begged me to note the curiosity of our worship
of aristocracy and royalty; and we, who were such slaves to rank, and
such tyrants in our own households,--we Britons were the great sticklers
for freedom! His conclusion was, that we were not logical. We would have
a Throne, which we would not allow the liberty to do anything to make it
worthy of rational veneration: we would have a peerage, of which we were
so jealous that it formed almost an assembly of automatons; we would
have virtuous women, only for them to be pursued by immoral men.
Peterborough feared, he must say, that we were an inconsequent people.
His residence abroad had so far unhinged him; but a pipe would have
stopped his complainings.

Moved, perhaps, by generous wine, in concert with his longing for
tobacco, he dropped an observation of unwonted shrewdness; he said: ‘The
squire, my dear Harry, a most honourable and straightforward country
gentleman, and one of our very wealthiest, is still, I would venture to
suggest, an example of old blood that requires--I study race--varying,
modifying, one might venture to say, correcting; and really, a friend
with more privileges than I possess, would or should throw him a hint
that no harm has been done to the family by an intermixture... old
blood does occasionally need it--you know I study blood--it becomes too
coarse, or, in some cases, too fine. The study of the mixture of blood
is probably one of our great physical problems.’

Peterborough commended me to gratitude for the imaginative and
chivalrous element bestowed on me by a father that was other than a
country squire; one who could be tolerant of innocent habits, and not of
guilty ones--a further glance at the interdicted pipe. I left him almost
whimpering for it.

The contemplation of the curious littleness of the lives of men and
women lived in this England of ours, made me feel as if I looked at them
out of a palace balcony-window; for no one appeared to hope very much or
to fear; people trotted in their different kinds of harness; and I was
amused to think of my heart going regularly in imitation of those about
me. I was in a princely state of mind indeed, not disinclined for a time
to follow the general course of life, while despising it. An existence
without colour, without anxious throbbing, without salient matter for
thought, challenged contempt. But it was exceedingly funny. My aunt
Dorothy, the squire, and Janet submitted to my transparent inward
laughter at them, patiently waiting for me to share their contentment,
in the deluded belief that the hour would come. The principal items of
news embraced the death of Squire Gregory Bulsted, the marriage of this
and that young lady, a legal contention between my grandfather and Lady
Maria Higginson, the wife of a rich manufacturer newly located among
us, on account of a right of encampment on Durstan heath, my grandfather
taking side with the gipsies, and beating her ladyship--a friend of
Heriot’s, by the way. Concerning Heriot, my aunt Dorothy was in trouble.
She could not, she said, approve his behaviour in coming to this
neighbourhood at all, and she hinted that I might induce him to keep
away. I mentioned Julia Bulsted’s being in mourning, merely to bring in
her name tentatively.

‘Ay, mourning’s her outer rig, never doubt,’ said the squire. ‘Flick
your whip at her, she ‘s a charitable soul, Judy Bulsted! She knits
stockings for the poor. She’d down and kiss the stump of a sailor on a
stick o’ timber. All the same, she oughtn’t to be alone. Pity she hasn’t
a baby. You and I’ll talk it over by-and-by, Harry.’

Kiomi was spoken of, and Lady Maria Higginson, and then Heriot.

‘M-m-m-m rascal!’ hummed the squire. ‘There’s three, and that’s not
enough for him. Six months back a man comes over from Surreywards, a
farm he calls Dipwell, and asks after you, Harry; rigmaroles about a
handsome lass gone off... some scoundrel! You and I’ll talk it over
by-and-by, Harry.’

Janet raised and let fall her eyebrows. The fiction, that so much having
been said, an immediate show of reserve on such topics preserved her
in ignorance of them, was one she subscribed to merely to humour the
squire. I was half in doubt whether I disliked or admired her want of
decent hypocrisy. She allowed him to suppose that she did not hear, but
spoke as a party to the conversation. My aunt Dorothy blamed Julia. The
squire thundered at Heriot; Janet, liking both, contented herself with
impartial comments.

‘I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,’ she
said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all
things in it. We rode over to Julia’s cottage, on the outskirts of
the estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly
bewitching lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the captain
was doing, serving his country in foreign parts, while such as these
were shining without a captain at home. Janet approved his conduct, and
was right. ‘What can a wife think the man worth who sits down to guard
his house-door?’ she answered my slight innuendo. She compared the man
to a kennel-dog. ‘This,’ said I, ‘comes of made-up matches,’ whereat she
was silent.

Julia took her own view of her position. She asked me whether it was
not dismal for one who was called a grass widow, and was in reality
a salt-water one, to keep fresh, with a lapdog, a cook, and a
maid-servant, and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for
twice that he opened it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing
creature day after day! At first she was shy, stole out a coy line
of fingers to be shaken, and lisped; and out of that mood came
right-about-face, with an exclamation of regret that she supposed she
must not kiss me now. I projected, she drew back. ‘Shall Janet go?’
said I. ‘Then if nobody’s present I ‘ll be talked of,’ said she, moaning
queerly. The tendency of her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her
handsome face an aspect deliriously wild. I complimented her on her
keeping so fresh, in spite of her salt-water widowhood. She turned the
tables on me for looking so powerful, though I was dying for a foreign
princess.

‘Oh! but that’ll blow over,’ she said; ‘anything blows over as long
as you don’t go up to the altar’; and she eyed her ringed finger,
woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her
William. Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed
me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of
ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire
and the other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping. ‘And if you
get Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it’ll be better for
him, I’m sure,’ she added, and naively:

‘I ‘d like to meet him up at the Grange.’ Temple, she said, had left the
Navy and was reading in London for the Bar--good news to me.

‘You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,’ Janet
observed on the ride home.

‘Do you take her for a real person, Janet?’

‘One thinks of her as a snow-mountain you’ve been admiring.’

‘Very well; so let her be.’

‘Is she kind and good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does she ride well?’

‘She rides remarkably well.’

‘She ‘s fair, I suppose?’

‘Janet, if I saw you married to Temple, it would be the second great
wish of my heart.’

‘Harry, you’re a bit too cruel, as Julia would say.’

‘Have you noticed she gets more and more Irish?’

‘Perhaps she finds it is liked. Some women can adapt themselves... they
‘re the happiest. All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess is
like the rest of us?’

‘Not at all,’ said I, unconscious of hurting.

‘Never mind. Don’t be hard on Julia. She has the making of a good
woman--a girl can see that; only she can’t bear loneliness, and doesn’t
understand yet what it is to be loved by a true gentleman. Persons of
that class can’t learn it all at once.’

I was pained to see her in tears. Her figure was straight, and she spoke
without a quaver of her voice.

‘Heriot’s an excellent fellow,’ I remarked.

‘He is. I can’t think ill of my friends,’ said she.

‘Dear girl, is it these two who make you unhappy?’

‘No; but dear old grandada!...’

The course of her mind was obvious. I would rather have had her less
abrupt and more personal in revealing it. I stammered something.

‘Heriot does not know you as I do,’ she said, strangling a whimper. ‘I
was sure it was serious, though one’s accustomed to associate princesses
with young men’s dreams. I fear, Harry, it will half break our dear old
grandada’s heart. He is rough, and you have often been against him,
for one unfortunate reason. If you knew him as I do you would pity him
sincerely. He hardly grumbled at all at your terribly long absence. Poor
old man! he hopes on.’

‘He’s incurably unjust to my father.’

‘Your father has been with you all the time, Harry? I guessed it.’

‘Well?’

‘It generally bodes no good to the Grange. Do pardon me for saying that.
I know nothing of him; I know only that the squire is generous, and THAT
I stand for with all my might. Forgive me for what I said.’

‘Forgive you--with all my heart. I like you all the better. You ‘re a
brave partisan. I don’t expect women to be philosophers.’

‘Well, Harry, I would take your side as firmly as anybody’s.’

‘Do, then; tell the squire how I am situated.’

‘Ah!’ she half sighed, ‘I knew this was coming.’

‘How could it other than come? You can do what you like with the squire.
I’m dependent on him, and I am betrothed to the Princess Ottilia. God
knows how much she has to trample down on her part. She casts off--to
speak plainly, she puts herself out of the line of succession, and for
whom? for me. In her father’s lifetime she will hardly yield me her
hand; but I must immediately be in a position to offer mine. She may:
who can tell? she is above all women in power and firmness. You talk of
generosity; could there be a higher example of it?’

‘I daresay; I know nothing of princesses,’ Janet murmured. ‘I don’t
quite comprehend what she has done. The point is, what am I to do?’

‘Prepare him for it. Soothe him in advance. Why, dear Janet, you can
reconcile him to anything in a minute.’

‘Lie to him downright?’

‘Now what on earth is the meaning of that, and why can’t you speak
mildly?’

‘I suppose I speak as I feel. I’m a plain speaker, a plain person. You
don’t give me an easy task, friend Harry.’

‘If you believe in his generosity, Janet, should you be afraid to put it
to proof?’

‘Grandada’s generosity, Harry? I do believe in it as I believe in my own
life. It happens to be the very thing I must keep myself from rousing
in him, to be of any service to you. Look at the old house!’ She changed
her tone. ‘Looking on old Riversley with the eyes of my head even, I
think I’m looking at something far away in the memory. Perhaps the deep
red brick causes it. There never was a house with so many beautiful
creepers. Bright as they are, you notice the roses on the wall. There’s
a face for me forever from every window; and good-bye, Riversley! Harry,
I’ll obey your wishes.’

So saying, she headed me, trotting down the heath-track.



CHAPTER XXXVII. JANET RENOUNCES ME

An illness of old Sewis, the butler,--amazingly resembling a sick monkey
in his bed,--kept me from paying a visit to Temple and seeing my father
for several weeks, during which time Janet loyally accustomed the
squire to hear of the German princess, and she did it with a decent
and agreeable cheerfulness that I quite approved of. I should have
been enraged at a martyr-like appearance on her part, for I demanded a
sprightly devotion to my interests, considering love so holy a thing,
that where it existed, all surrounding persons were bound to do it
homage and service. We were thrown together a great deal in attending
on poor old Sewis, who would lie on his pillows recounting for hours
my father’s midnight summons of the inhabitants of Riversley, and his
little Harry’s infant expedition into the world. Temple and Heriot came
to stay at the Grange, and assisted in some rough scene-painting--torrid
colours representing the island of Jamaica. We hung it at the foot of
old Sewis’s bed. He awoke and contemplated it, and went downstairs
the same day, cured, he declared: the fact being that the unfortunate
picture testified too strongly to the reversal of all he was used to in
life, in having those he served to wait on him. The squire celebrated
his recovery by giving a servants’ ball. Sewis danced with the
handsomest lass, swung her to supper, and delivered an extraordinary
speech, entirely concerning me, and rather to my discomposure,
particularly so when it was my fate to hear that the old man had made
me the heir of his savings. Such was his announcement, in a very excited
voice, but incidentally upon a solemn adjuration to the squire to beware
of his temper--govern his temper and not be a turncoat.

We were present at the head of the supper-table to hear our healths
drunk. Sewis spoke like a half-caste oblivious of his training, and of
the subjects he was at liberty to touch on as well. Evidently there was
a weight of foreboding on his mind. He knew his master well. The squire
excused him under the ejaculation, ‘Drunk, by the Lord!’ Sewis went so
far as to mention my father ‘He no disgrace, sar, he no disgrace, I say!
but he pull one way, old house pull other way, and ‘tween ‘em my little
Harry torn apieces, squire. He set out in the night “You not enter it
any more!” Very well. I go my lawyer next day. You see my Will, squire.
Years ago, and little Harry so high. Old Sewis not the man to change. He
no turncoat, squire. God bless you, my master; you recollect, and ladies
tell you if you forget, old Sewis no turncoat. You hate turncoat.
You taught old Sewis, and God bless you, and Mr. Harry, and British
Constitution, all Amen!’

With that he bounded to bed. He was dead next morning.

The squire was humorous over my legacy. It amounted to about seventeen
hundred pounds invested in Government Stock, and he asked me what I
meant to do with it; proposed a Charity to be established on behalf
of decayed half-castes, insisting that servants’ money could never be
appropriated to the uses of gentlemen. All the while he was muttering,
‘Turncoat! eh? turncoat?’--proof that the word had struck where it was
aimed. For me, after thinking on it, I had a superstitious respect for
the legacy, so I determined, in spite of the squire’s laughter over
‘Sixty pounds per annum!’ to let it rest in my name: I saw for the first
time the possibility that I might not have my grandfather’s wealth to
depend upon. He warned me of growing miserly. With my father in London,
living freely on my property, I had not much fear of that. However, I
said discreetly, ‘I don’t mind spending when I see my way.’

‘Oh! see your way,’ said he. ‘Better a niggard than a chuckfist.
Only, there ‘s my girl: she ‘s good at accounts. One ‘ll do for them,
Harry?--ha’n’t been long enough at home yet?’

Few were the occasions when our conversation did not diverge to this
sort of interrogation. Temple and Heriot, with whom I took counsel,
advised me to wait until the idea of the princess had worn its way into
his understanding, and leave the work to Janet. ‘Though,’ said Heriot
to me aside, ‘upon my soul, it’s slaughter.’ He believed that Janet felt
keenly. But then, she admired him, and so they repaid one another.

I won my grandfather’s confidence in practical matters on a trip we took
into Wales. But it was not enough for me to be a man of business, he
affirmed; he wanted me to have some ambition; why not stand for our
county at the next general election? He offered me his Welsh borough if
I thought fit to decline a contest. This was to speak as mightily as a
German prince. Virtually, in wealth and power, he was a prince; but of
how queer a kind! He was immensely gratified by my refraining to look
out for my father on our return journey through London, and remarked,
that I had not seen him for some time, he supposed. To which I said, no,
I had not, He advised me to let the fellow run his length. Suggesting
that he held it likely I contributed to ‘the fellow’s’ support: he said
generously, ‘Keep clear of him, Hal: I add you a thousand a year to
your allowance,’ and damned me for being so thoughtful over it. I found
myself shuddering at a breath of anger from him. Could he not with a
word dash my hopes for ever? The warning I had taken from old Sewis
transformed me to something like a hypocrite, and I dare say I gave
the squire to understand, that I had not seen my father for a very long
period and knew nothing of his recent doings.

‘Been infernally quiet these last two or three years,’ the squire
muttered of the object of his aversion. ‘I heard of a City widow last,
sick as a Dover packet-boat ‘bout the fellow! Well, the women are
ninnies, but you’re a man, Harry; you’re not to be taken in any longer,
eh?’

I replied that I knew my father better now, and was asked how the deuce
I knew him better; it was the world I knew better after my stay on the
Continent.

I contained myself enough to say, ‘Very well, the world, sir.’

‘Flirted with one of their princesses?’ He winked.

‘On that subject I will talk to you some other time,’ said I.

‘Got to pay an indemnity? or what?’ He professed alarm, and pushed for
explanations, with the air of a man of business ready to help me if need
were. ‘Make a clean breast of it, Harry. You ‘re not the son of Tom Fool
the Bastard for nothing, I’ll swear. All the same you’re Beltham;
you’re my grandson and heir, and I’ll stand by you. Out with ‘t! She’s a
princess, is she?’

The necessity for correcting his impressions taught me to think the
moment favourable. I said, ‘I am engaged to her, sir.’

He returned promptly: ‘Then you’ll break it off.’

I shook my head.

‘Why, you can’t jilt my girl at home!’ said he.

‘Do you find a princess objectionable, sir?’

‘Objectionable? She’s a foreigner. I don’t know her. I never saw her.
Here’s my Janet I’ve brought up for you, under my own eyes, out of the
way of every damned soft-sawderer, safe and plump as a melon under
a glass, and you fight shy of her, and go and engage yourself to a
foreigner I don’t know and never saw! By George, Harry, I’ll call in a
parson to settle you soon as ever we sight Riversley. I’ll couple you,
by George, I will! ‘fore either of you know whether you’re on your legs
or your backs.’

We were in the streets of London, so he was obliged to moderate his
vehemence.

‘Have you consulted Janet?’ said I.

‘Consulted her? ever since she was a chick with half a feather on.’

‘A chick with half a feather on,’ I remarked, ‘is not always of the same
mind as a piece of poultry of full plumage.’

‘Hang your sneering and your talk of a fine girl, like my Janet, as a
piece of poultry, you young rooster! You toss your head up like a cock
too conceited to crow. I ‘ll swear the girl ‘s in love with you. She
does you the honour to be fond of you. She ‘s one in a million. A
handsome girl, straight-backed, honest, just a dash, and not too much,
of our blood in her.’

‘Consult her again, sir,’ I broke in. ‘You will discover she is not of
your way of thinking.’

‘Do you mean to say she’s given you a left-hander, Harry?’

‘I have only to say that I have not given her the option.’

He groaned going up the steps of his hotel, faced me once or twice, and
almost gained my sympathy by observing, ‘When we’re boys, the old ones
worry us; when we’re old ones, the boys begin to tug!’ He rarely spoke
so humanely,--rarely, at least, to me.

For a wonder, he let the matter drop: possibly because he found me
temperate. I tried the system on him with good effect during our stay in
London; that is, I took upon myself to be always cool, always
courteous, deliberate in my replies, and not uncordial, though I was for
representing the reserved young man. I obtained some praise for my style
and bearing among his acquaintances. To one lady passing an encomium on
me, he said, ‘Oh, some foreign princess has been training him,’ which
seemed to me of good augury.

My friends Temple and Heriot were among the Riversley guests at
Christmas. We rode over to John Thresher’s, of whom we heard that the
pretty Mabel Sweetwinter had disappeared, and understood that suspicion
had fallen upon one of us gentlemen. Bob, her brother, had gone the way
of the bravest English fellows of his class-to America. We called on the
miller, a soured old man. Bob’s evasion affected him more than Mabel’s,
Martha Thresher said, in derision of our sex. I was pained to hear from
her that Bob supposed me the misleader of his sister; and that he had,
as she believed, left England, to avoid the misery of ever meeting me
again, because he liked me so much. She had been seen walking down the
lanes with some one resembling me in figure. Heriot took the miller’s
view, counting the loss of one stout young Englishman to his country of
far greater importance than the escapades of dozens of girls, for which
simple creatures he had no compassion: he held the expression of it a
sham. He had grown coxcombical. Without talking of his conquests, he
talked largely of the ladies who were possibly in the situation of
victims to his grace of person, though he did not do so with any
unctuous boasting. On the contrary, there was a rather taking undertone
of regret that his enfeebled over-fat country would give her military
son no worthier occupation. He laughed at the mention of Julia Bulsted’s
name. ‘She proves, Richie, marriage is the best of all receipts for
women, just as it’s the worst for men. Poor Billy Bulsted, for instance,
a first-rate seaman, and his heart’s only half in his profession since
he and Julia swore their oath; and no wonder,--he made something his own
that won’t go under lock and key. No military or naval man ought ever to
marry.’

‘Stop,’ said Temple, ‘is the poor old country--How about continuing the
race of heroes?’

Heriot commended him to rectories, vicarages, and curates’ lodgings
for breeding grounds, and coming round to Julia related one of the racy
dialogues of her married life. ‘The saltwater widow’s delicious. Billy
rushes home from his ship in a hurry. What’s this Greg writes me?--That
he ‘s got a friend of his to drink with him, d’ ye mean, William?--A
friend of yours, ma’am.--And will you say a friend of mine is not a
friend of yours, William?--Julia, you’re driving me mad!--And is
that far from crazy, where you said I drove you at first sight of me,
William? Back to his ship goes Billy with a song of love and constancy.’

I said nothing of my chagrin at the behaviour of the pair who had
furnished my first idea of the romantic beauty of love.

‘Why does she talk twice as Irish as she used to, Heriot?’

‘Just to coax the world to let her be as nonsensical as she likes. She’s
awfully dull; she has only her nonsense to amuse her. I repeat: soldiers
and sailors oughtn’t to marry. I’m her best friend. I am, on my honour:
for I ‘m going to make Billy give up the service, since he can’t give
her up. There she is!’ he cried out, and waved his hat to a lady on
horseback some way down the slope of a road leading to the view of our
heathland:

‘There’s the only girl living fit to marry a man and swear she ‘ll stick
to him through life and death.’

He started at a gallop. Temple would have gone too at any possible
speed, for he knew as well as I did that Janet was the girl alone
capable of winning a respectful word from Heriot; but I detained him
to talk of Ottilia and my dismal prospect of persuading the squire to
consent to my proposal for her, and to dower her in a manner worthy a
princess. He doled out his yes and no to me vacantly. Janet and Heriot
came at a walking pace to meet us, he questioning her, she replying, but
a little differently from her usual habit of turning her full face to
the speaker. He was evidently startled, and, to judge from his posture,
repeated his question, as one would say, ‘You did this?’ She nodded, and
then uttered some rapid words, glanced at him, laughed shyly, and sank
her features into repose as we drew near. She had a deep blush on her
face. I thought it might be, that Janet and her loud champion had come
to particular terms, a supposition that touched me with regrets for
Temple’s sake. But Heriot was not looking pleased. It happened that
whatever Janet uttered struck a chord of opposition in me. She liked the
Winter and the Winter sunsets, had hopes of a frost for skating, liked
our climate, thought our way of keeping Christmas venerable, rejoiced in
dispensing the squire’s bounties--called them bounties, joined Heriot
in abusing foreign countries to the exaltation of her own: all this with
‘Well, Harry, I’m sorry you don’t think as we do. And we do, don’t we?’
she addressed him.

‘I reserve a point,’ he said, and not playfully.

She appeared distressed, and courted a change of expression in his
features, and I have to confess that never having seen her gaze upon
any one save myself in that fashion, which was with her very winning,
especially where some of her contralto tones of remonstrance or entreaty
aided it, I felt as a man does at a neighbour’s shadow cast over his
rights of property.

Heriot dropped to the rear: I was glad to leave her with Temple, and
glad to see them canter ahead together on the sand of tie heaths.

‘She has done it,’ Heriot burst out abruptly. ‘She has done it!’ he
said again. ‘Upon my soul, I never wished in my life before that I was
a marrying man: I might have a chance of ending worth something. She
has won the squire round with a thundering fib, and you’re to have the
German if you can get her. Don’t be in a hurry. The squire ‘ll speak to
you to-night: but think over it. Will you? Think what a girl this is.
I believe on my honour no man ever had such an offer of a true woman.
Come, don’t think it’s Heriot speaking--I’ve always liked her, of
course. But I have always respected her, and that’s not of course.
Depend upon it, a woman who can be a friend of men is the right sort
of woman to make a match with. Do you suppose she couldn’t have a dozen
fellows round her at the lift of her finger? the pick of the land! I’d
trust her with an army. I tell you, Janet Ilchester ‘s the only girl
alive who’ll double the man she marries. I don’t know another who
wouldn’t make the name of wife laugh the poor devil out of house and
company. She’s firm as a rock; and sweet as a flower on it! Will that
touch you? Bah! Richie, let’s talk like men. I feel for her because
she’s fond of you, and I know what it is when a girl like that sets her
heart on a fellow. There,’ he concluded, ‘I ‘d ask you to go down on
your knees and pray before you decide against her!’

Heriot succeeded in raising a certain dull indistinct image in my mind
of a well-meaning girl, to whom I was bound to feel thankful, and felt
so. I thanked Heriot, too, for his friendly intentions. He had never
seen the Princess Ottilia. And at night I thanked my grandfather. He
bore himself, on the whole, like the good and kindly old gentleman
Janet loved to consider him. He would not stand in my light, he said,
recurring to that sheet-anchor of a tolerant sentence whenever his
forehead began to gather clouds. He regretted that Janet was no better
than her sex in her preference for rakes, and wished me to the deuce
for bringing Heriot into the house, and not knowing when I was lucky.
‘German grandchildren, eh!’ he muttered. No Beltham had ever married
a foreigner. What was the time fixed between us for the marriage? He
wanted to see his line safe before he died. ‘How do I know this foreign
woman’ll bear?’ he asked, expecting an answer. His hand was on the
back of a chair, grasping and rocking it; his eyes bent stormily on the
carpet; they were set blinking rapidly after a glance at me. Altogether
his self-command was creditable to Janet’s tuition.

Janet met me next day, saying with some insolence (so it struck me from
her liveliness): ‘Well, it’s all right, Harry? Now you’ll be happy, I
hope. I did not shine in my reply. Her amiable part appeared to be to
let me see how brilliant and gracious the commonplace could be made to
look. She kept Heriot at the Grange, against the squire’s remonstrance
and her mother’s. ‘It ‘s to keep him out of harm’s way: the women he
knows are not of the best kind for him,’ she said, with astounding
fatuity. He submitted, and seemed to like it. She must be teaching
Temple to skate figures in the frost, with a great display of
good-humoured patience, and her voice at musical pitches. But her
principal affectation was to talk on matters of business with Mr. Burgin
and Mr. Trewint, the squire’s lawyer and bailiff, on mines and interest,
on money and economical questions; not shrinking from politics either,
until the squire cries out to the males assisting in the performance,
‘Gad, she ‘s a head as good as our half-dozen put together,’ and they
servilely joined their fragmentary capitals in agreement. She went so
far as to retain Peterborough to teach her Latin. He was idling in the
expectation of a living in the squire’s gift.

The annoyance for me was that I could not detach myself from a
contemplation of these various scenes, by reverting to my life in
Germany. The preposterous closing of my interview with Ottilia blocked
the way, and I was unable to write to her--unable to address her even
in imagination, without pangs of shame at the review of the petty
conspiracy I had sanctioned to entrap her to plight her hand to me, and
without perpetually multiplying excuses for my conduct. So to escape
them I was reduced to study Janet, forming one of her satellites. She
could say to me impudently, with all the air of a friendly comrade, ‘Had
your letter from Germany yet, Harry?’ She flew--she was always on the
chase. I saw her permit Heriot to kiss her hand, and then the squire
appeared, and Heriot and she burst into laughter, and the squire, with a
puzzled face, would have the game explained to him, but understood not a
bit of it, only growled at me; upon which Janet became serious and chid
him. I was told by my aunt Dorothy to admire this behaviour of hers. One
day she certainly did me a service: a paragraph in one of the newspapers
spoke of my father, not flatteringly: ‘Richmond is in the field again,’
it commenced. The squire was waiting for her to hand the paper to him.
None of us could comprehend why she played him off and denied him his
right to the first perusal of the news; she was voluble, almost witty,
full of sprightly Roxalana petulance.

‘This paper,’ she said, ‘deserves to be burnt,’ and she was allowed
to burn it--money article, mining column as well--on the pretext of
an infamous anti-Tory leader, of which she herself composed the first
sentence to shock the squire completely. I had sight of that paper some
time afterwards. Richmond was in the field again, it stated, with mock
flourishes. But that was not the worst. My grandfather’s name was down
there, and mine, and Princess Ottilia’s. My father’s connection with the
court of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld was alluded to as the latest, and next
to his winning the heiress of Riversley, the most successful of his
ventures, inasmuch as his son, if rumour was to be trusted, had obtained
the promise of the hand of the princess. The paragraph was an excerpt
from a gossiping weekly journal, perhaps less malevolent than I thought
it. There was some fun to be got out of a man who, the journal in
question was informed, had joined the arms of England and a petty German
principality stamped on his plate and furniture.

My gratitude to Janet was fervent enough when I saw what she had saved
me from. I pressed her hand and held it. I talked stupidly, but I made
my cruel position intelligible to her, and she had the delicacy, on this
occasion, to keep her sentiments regarding my father unuttered. We sat
hardly less than an hour side by side--I know not how long hand in hand.
The end was an extraordinary trembling in the limb abandoned to me.
It seized her frame. I would have detained her, but it was plain she
suffered both in her heart and her pride. Her voice was under fair
command-more than mine was. She counselled me to go to London, at once.
‘I would be off to London if I were you, Harry,’--for the purpose
of checking my father’s extravagances,--would have been the further
wording, which she spared me; and I thanked her, wishing, at the same
time, that she would get the habit of using choicer phrases whenever
there might, by chance, be a stress of emotion between us. Her
trembling, and her ‘I’d be off,’ came into unpleasant collision in the
recollection.

I acknowledge to myself that she was a true and hearty friend. She
listened with interest to my discourse on the necessity of my being in
Parliament before I could venture to propose formally for the hand
of the princess, and undertook to bear the burden of all consequent
negotiations with my grandfather. If she would but have allowed me to
speak of Temple, instead of saying, ‘Don’t, Harry, I like him so
much!’ at the very mention of his name, I should have sincerely felt my
indebtedness to her, and some admiration of her fine spirit and figure
besides. I could not even agree with my aunt Dorothy that Janet was
handsome. When I had to grant her a pardon I appreciated her better.



CHAPTER XXXVIII. MY BANKERS’ BOOK

The squire again did honour to Janet’s eulogy and good management of
him.

‘And where,’ said she, ‘would you find a Radical to behave so
generously, Harry, when it touches him so?’

He accorded me his permission to select my side in politics, merely
insisting that I was never to change it, and this he requested me to
swear to, for (he called the ghost of old Sewis to witness) he abhorred
a turncoat.

‘If you’re to be a Whig, or a sneaking half-and-half, I can’t help you
much,’ he remarked. ‘I can pop a young Tory in for my borough, maybe;
but I can’t insult a number of independent Englishmen by asking them to
vote for the opposite crew; that’s reasonable, eh? And I can’t promise
you plumpers for the county neither. You can date your Address from
Riversley. You’ll have your house in town. Tell me this princess
of yours is ready with her hand, and,’ he threw in roughly, ‘is a
respectable young woman, I’ll commence building. You’ll have a house fit
for a prince in town and country, both.’

Temple had produced an effect on him by informing him that ‘this
princess of mine’ was entitled to be considered a fit and proper person,
in rank and blood, for an alliance with the proudest royal Houses of
Europe, and my grandfather was not quite destitute of consolation in the
prospect I presented to him. He was a curious study to me, of the Tory
mind, in its attachment to solidity, fixity, certainty, its unmatched
generosity within a limit, its devotion to the family, and its family
eye for the country. An immediate introduction to Ottilia would have won
him to enjoy the idea of his grandson’s marriage; but not having seen
her, he could not realize her dignity, nor even the womanliness of a
‘foreign woman.’

‘Thank God for one thing,’ he said: ‘we shan’t have that fellow
bothering--shan’t have the other half of your family messing the
business. You’ll have to account for him to your wife as you best can.
I ‘ve nothing to do with him, mind that. He came to my house, stole my
daughter, crazed her wits, dragged us all...’

The excuse to turn away from the hearing of abuse of my father was too
good to be neglected, though it was horribly humiliating that I should
have to take advantage of it--vexatious that I should seem chargeable
with tacit lying in allowing the squire to suppose the man he hated
to be a stranger to the princess. Not feeling sure whether it might be
common prudence to delude him even passively, I thought of asking Janet
for her opinion, but refrained. A stout deceiver has his merits, but a
feeble hypocrite applying to friends to fortify him in his shifts
and tergiversations must provoke contempt. I desired that Janet might
continue to think well of me. I was beginning to drop in my own esteem,
which was the mirror of my conception of Ottilia’s view of her lover.

Now, had I consulted Janet, I believe the course of my history would
have been different, for she would not then, I may imagine, have been
guilty of her fatal slip of the tongue that threw us into heavy seas
when we thought ourselves floating on canal waters. A canal barge (an
image to me of the most perfect attainable peace), suddenly, on its
passage through our long fir-woods, with their scented reeds and flowing
rushes, wild balsam and silky cotton-grass beds, sluiced out to sea and
storm, would be somewhat in my likeness soon after a single luckless
observation had passed at our Riversley breakfast-table one Sunday
morning.

My aunt Dorothy and Mr. Peterborough were conversing upon the varieties
of Christian sects, and particularly such as approached nearest
to Anglicanism, together with the strange, saddening fact that the
Christian religion appeared to be more divided than, Peterborough
regretted to say, the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha,
Mahomet, and other impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us,
that we did not discard the reason of man we admitted man’s finite
reason to our school of faith, and it was found refractory. Hence our
many divisions.

‘The Roman Catholics admit reason?’ said Janet, who had too strong a
turn for showing her keenness in little encounters with Peterborough.

‘No,’ said he; ‘the Protestants.’ And, anxious to elude her, he pressed
on to enchain my aunt Dorothy’s attention. Janet plagued him meanwhile;
and I helped her. We ran him and his schoolboy, the finite refractory,
up and down, until Peterborough was glad to abandon him, and Janet
said, ‘Did you preach to the Germans much?’ He had officiated in Prince
Ernest’s private chapel: not, he added in his egregious modesty, not
that he personally wished to officiate.

‘It was Harry’s wish?’ Janet said, smiling.

‘My post of tutor,’ Peterborough hastened to explain, ‘was almost
entirely supernumerary. The circumstances being so, I the more readily
acquiesced in the title of private chaplain, prepared to fulfil such
duties as devolved upon me in that capacity, and acting thereon I
proffered my occasional services. Lutheranism and Anglicanism are not,
doubtless you are aware, divided on the broader bases. We are common
Protestants. The Papacy, I can assure you, finds as little favour with
one as with the other. Yes, I held forth, as you would say, from time
to time. My assumption of the title of private chaplain, it was thought,
improved the family dignity--that is, on our side.’

‘Thought by Harry?’ said Janet; and my aunt Dorothy said, ‘You and Harry
had a consultation about it?’

‘Wanted to appear as grand as they could,’ quoth the squire.

Peterborough signified an assent, designed to modify the implication.
‘Not beyond due bounds, I trust, sir.’

‘Oh! now I understand,’ Janet broke out in the falsetto notes of a
puzzle solved in the mind. ‘It was his father! Harry proclaiming his
private chaplain!’

‘Mr. Harry’s father did first suggest--’ said Peterborough, but her
quickly-altered features caused him to draw in his breath, as she had
done after one short laugh.

My grandfather turned a round side-eye on me, hard as a cock’s.

Janet immediately started topics to fill Peterborough’s mouth: the
weather, the walk to church, the probable preacher. ‘And, grandada,’
said she to the squire, who was muttering ominously with a grim
under-jaw, ‘His private chaplain!’ and for this once would not hear
her, ‘Grandada, I shall drive you over to see papa this afternoon.’
She talked as if nothing had gone wrong. Peterborough, criminal red,
attacked a jam-pot for a diversion. ‘Such sweets are rare indeed on the
Continent,’ he observed to my aunt Dorothy. ‘Our homemade dainties are
matchless.’

‘Private chaplain!’ the squire growled again.

‘It’s you that preach this afternoon,’ Janet said to Peterborough. ‘Do
you give us an extempore sermon?’

‘You remind me, Miss Ilchester, I must look to it; I have a little
trimming to do.’

Peterborough thought he might escape, but the squire arrested him.
‘You’ll give me five minutes before you’re out of the house, please. D’
ye smoke on Sundays?’

‘Not on Sundays, sir,’ said Peterborough, openly and cordially, as
to signify that they were of one mind regarding the perniciousness of
Sunday smoking.

‘See you don’t set fire to my ricks with your foreign chaplain’s
tricks. I spied you puffing behind one t’ other day. There,’ the squire
dispersed Peterborough’s unnecessary air of abstruse recollection,
‘don’t look as though you were trying to hit on a pin’s head in a bushel
of oats. Don’t set my ricks on fire--that ‘s all.’

‘Mr. Peterborough,’ my aunt Dorothy interposed her voice to soften this
rough treatment of him with the offer of some hot-house flowers for his
sitting-room.

‘Oh, I thank you!’ I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to
the squire’s mercy.

Janet followed me out. ‘It was my fault, Harry. You won’t blame him, I
know. But will he fib? I don’t think he’s capable of it, and I’m sure
he can’t run and double. Grandada will have him fast before a minute is
over.’

I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire’s promise
that Peterborough should have his living,--so much it seemed possible to
save.

She flew back, and in Peterborough’s momentary absence, did her work.
Nothing could save the unhappy gentleman from a distracting scene and
much archaic English. The squire’s power of vituperation was notorious:
he could be more than a match for roadside navvies and predatory tramps
in cogency of epithet. Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing
that he had never heard such language,--never dreamed of it. And to find
himself the object of it!--and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously
defend himself! The pain to him was in the conscience,--which is, like
the spleen, a function whose uses are only to be understood in its
derangement. He had eased his conscience to every question right
out, and he rejoiced to me at the immense relief it gave him.
Conscientiously, he could not deny that he knew the squire’s objection
to my being in my father’s society; and he had connived at it ‘for
reasons, my dearest Harry, I can justify to God and man, but not--I
had to confess as much--not, I grieve to say, to your grandfather. I
attempted to do justice to the amiable qualities of the absent. In a
moment I was assailed with epithets that... and not a word is to be
got in when he is so violent. One has to make up one’s mind to act
Andromeda, and let him be the sea-monster, as somebody has said; I
forget the exact origin of the remark.’

The squire certainly had a whole ocean at command. I strung myself
to pass through the same performance. To my astonishment I went
unchallenged. Janet vehemently asserted that she had mollified the
angry old man, who, however, was dark of visage, though his tongue
kept silence. He was gruff over his wine-glass the blandishments of
his favourite did not brighten him. From his point of view he had been
treated vilely, and he was apparently inclined to nurse his rancour and
keep my fortunes trembling in the balance. Under these circumstances it
was impossible for me to despatch a letter to Ottilia, though I found
that I could write one now, and I sat in my room writing all day,--most
eloquent stuff it was. The shadow of misfortune restored the sense of my
heroical situation, which my father had extinguished, and this unlocked
the powers of speech. I wrote so admirably that my wretchedness could
enjoy the fine millinery I decorated it in. Then to tear the noble
composition to pieces was a bitter gratification. Ottilia’s station
repelled and attracted me mysteriously. I could not separate her from
it, nor keep my love of her from the contentions into which it threw me.
In vain I raved, ‘What is rank?’ There was a magnet in it that could at
least set me quivering and twisting, behaving like a man spellbound, as
madly as any hero of the ballads under a wizard’s charm.

At last the squire relieved us. He fixed that side-cast cock’s eye of
his on me, and said, ‘Where ‘s your bankers’ book, sir?’

I presumed that it was with my bankers, but did not suggest the
possibility that my father might have it in his custody; for he had a
cheque-book of his own, and regulated our accounts. Why not? I thought,
and flushed somewhat defiantly. The money was mine.

‘Any objection to my seeing that book?’ said the squire.

‘None whatever, sir.’

He nodded. I made it a point of honour to write for the book to be sent
down to me immediately.

The book arrived, and the squire handed it to me to break the cover,
insisting, ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather not have me look at it?’

‘Quite,’ I replied. The question of money was to me perfectly
unimportant. I did not see a glimpse of danger in his perusing the list
of my expenses.

‘‘Cause I give you my word I know nothing about it now,’ he said.

I complimented him on his frank method of dealing, and told him to look
at the book if he pleased, but with prudence sufficiently awake to check
the declaration that I had not once looked at it myself.

He opened it. We had just assembled in the hall, where breakfast was
laid during Winter, before a huge wood fire. Janet had her teeth on
her lower lip, watching the old man’s face. I did not condescend to be
curious; but when I turned my head to him he was puffing through thin
lips, and then his mouth crumpled in a knob. He had seen sights.

‘By George, I must have breakfast ‘fore I go into this!’ he exclaimed,
and stared as if he had come out of an oven.

Dorothy Beltham reminded him that Prayers had not been read.

‘Prayers!’ He was about to objurgate, but affirmatived her motion to
ring the bell for the servants, and addressed Peterborough: ‘You read
‘em abroad every morning?’

Peterborough’s conscience started off on its inevitable jog-trot at a
touch of the whip. ‘A-yes; that is--oh, it was my office.’ He had to
recollect with exactitude:

‘I should specify exceptions; there were intervals...’

‘Please, open your Bible,’ the squire cut him short; ‘I don’t want a
damned fine edge on everything.’

Partly for an admonition to him, or in pure nervousness, Peterborough
blew his nose monstrously: an unlucky note; nothing went well after it.
‘A slight cold,’ he murmured and resumed the note, and threw himself
maniacally into it. The unexpected figure of Captain Bulsted on tiptoe,
wearing the ceremonial depressed air of intruders on these occasions,
distracted our attention for a moment.

‘Fresh from ship, William?’ the squire called out.

The captain ejaculated a big word, to judge of it from the aperture, but
it was mute as his footing on the carpet, and he sat and gazed devoutly
toward Peterborough, who had waited to see him take his seat, and must
now, in his hurry to perform his duty, sweep the peccant little redbound
book to the floor. ‘Here, I’ll have that,’ said the squire. ‘Allow me,
sir,’ said Peterborough; and they sprang into a collision.

‘Would you jump out of your pulpit to pick up an old woman’s umbrella?’
the squire asked him in wrath, and muttered of requiring none of
his clerical legerdemain with books of business. Tears were in
Peterborough’s eyes. My aunt Dorothy’s eyes dwelt kindly on him to
encourage him, but the man’s irritable nose was again his enemy.

Captain Bulsted chanced to say in the musical voice of inquiry: ‘Prayers
are not yet over, are they?’

‘No, nor never will be with a parson blowing his horn at this rate,’
the squire rejoined. ‘And mind you,’ he said to Peterborough, after
dismissing the servants, to whom my aunt Dorothy read the morning
lessons apart, ‘I’d not have had this happen, sir, for money in lumps.
I’ve always known I should hang the day when my house wasn’t blessed
in the morning by prayer. So did my father, and his before him. Fiddle!
sir, you can’t expect young people to wear decent faces when the
parson’s hopping over the floor like a flea, and trumpeting as if the
organ-pipe wouldn’t have the sermon at any price. You tried to juggle me
out of this book here.’

‘On my!--indeed, sir, no!’ Peterborough proclaimed his innocence, and it
was unlikely that the squire should have suspected him.

Captain Bulsted had come to us for his wife, whom he had not found at
home on his arrival last midnight.

‘God bless my soul,’ said the squire, ‘you don’t mean to tell me she’s
gone off, William?’

‘Oh! dear, no, sir,’ said the captain, ‘she’s only cruising.’

The squire recommended a draught of old ale. The captain accepted it.
His comportment was cheerful in a sober fashion, notwithstanding the
transparent perturbation of his spirit. He answered my aunt Dorothy’s
questions relating to Julia simply and manfully, as became a gallant
seaman, cordially excusing his wife for not having been at home to
welcome him, with the singular plea, based on his knowledge of the sex,
that the nearer she knew him to be the less able was she to sit on
her chair waiting like Patience. He drank his ale from the hands of
Sillabin, our impassive new butler, who had succeeded Sewis, the squire
told him, like a Whig Ministry the Tory; proof that things were not
improving.

‘I thought, sir, things were getting better,’ said the captain.

‘The damnedest mistake ever made, William. How about the Fall of Man,
then? eh? You talk like a heathen Radical. It’s Scripture says we’re
going from better to worse, and that’s Tory doctrine. And stick to the
good as long as you can! Why, William, you were a jolly bachelor once.’

‘Sir, and ma’am,’ the captain bowed to Dorothy Beltham, ‘I have, thanks
to you, never known happiness but in marriage, and all I want is my
wife.’

The squire fretted for Janet to depart. ‘I ‘m going, grandada,’ she
said. ‘You’ll oblige me by not attending to any matter of business
to-day. Give me that book of Harry’s to keep for you.’

‘How d’ ye mean, my dear?’

‘It ‘s bad work done on a Sunday, you know.’

‘So it is. I’ll lock up the book.’

‘I have your word for that, grandada,’ said Janet.

The ladies retired, taking Peterborough with them.

‘Good-bye to the frocks! and now, William, out with your troubles,’ said
the squire.

The captain’s eyes were turned to the door my aunt Dorothy had passed
through.

‘You remember the old custom, sir!’

‘Ay, do I, William. Sorry for you then; infernally sorry for you now,
that I am! But you’ve run your head into the halter.’

‘I love her, sir; I love her to distraction. Let any man on earth say
she’s not an angel, I flatten him dead as his lie. By the way, sir, I am
bound in duty to inform you I am speaking of my wife.’

‘To be sure you are, William, and a trim schooner-yacht she is.’

‘She ‘s off, sir; she’s off!’

I thought it time to throw in a word. ‘Captain Bulsted, I should hold
any man but you accountable to me for hinting such things of my friend.’

‘Harry, your hand,’ he cried, sparkling.

‘Hum; his hand!’ growled the squire. ‘His hand’s been pretty lively on
the Continent, William. Here, look at this book, William, and the bundle
o’ cheques! No, I promised my girl. We’ll go into it to-morrow, he
and I, early. The fellow has shot away thousands and thousands--been
gallivanting among his foreign duchesses and countesses. There ‘s a
petticoat in that bank-book of his; and more than one, I wager. Now
he’s for marrying a foreign princess--got himself in a tangle there, it
seems.’

‘Mightily well done, Harry!’ Captain Bulsted struck a terrific encomium
on my shoulder, groaning, ‘May she be true to you, my lad!’

The squire asked him if he was going to church that morning.

‘I go to my post, sir, by my fireside,’ the captain replied; nor could
he be induced to leave his post vacant by the squire’s promise to him of
a sermon that would pickle his temper for a whole week’s wear and tear.
He regretted extremely that he could not enjoy so excellent a trial of
his patience, but he felt himself bound to go to his post and wait.

I walked over to Bulsted with him, and heard on the way that it was
Heriot who had called for her and driven her off. ‘The man had been, I
supposed,’ Captain Bulsted said, ‘deputed by some of you to fetch
her over to Riversley. My servants mentioned his name. I thought it
adviseable not to trouble the ladies with it to-day.’ He meditated. ‘I
hoped I should find her at the Grange in the morning, Harry. I slept on
it, rather than startle the poor lamb in the night.’

I offered him to accompany him at once to Heriot’s quarters.

‘What! and let my wife know I doubted her fidelity. My girl shall never
accuse me of that.’

As it turned out, Julia had been taken by Heriot on a visit to Lady
Maria Higginson, the wife of the intrusive millionaire, who particularly
desired to know her more intimately. Thoughtless Julia, accepting the
impudent invitation without scruple, had allowed herself to be driven
away without stating the place of her destination. She and Heriot were
in the Higginsons’ pew at church. Hearing from Janet of her husband’s
arrival, she rushed home, and there, instead of having to beg
forgiveness, was summoned to grant pardon. Captain Bulsted had drawn
largely on Squire Gregory’s cellar to assist him in keeping his post.

The pair appeared before us fondling ineffably next day, neither one
of them capable of seeing that our domestic peace at the Grange was
unseated. ‘We ‘re the two wretchedest creatures alive; haven’t any of
ye to spare a bit of sympathy for us?’ Julia began. ‘We ‘re like on
a pitchfork. There’s William’s duty to his country, and there ‘s his
affection for me, and they won’t go together, because Government, which
is that horrid Admiralty, fears pitching and tossing for post-captains’
wives. And William away, I ‘m distracted, and the Admiralty’s hair’s on
end if he stops. And, ‘deed, Miss Beltham, I’m not more than married to
just half a husband.’

The captain echoed her, ‘Half! but happy enough for twenty whole ones,
if you’ll be satisfied, my duck.’

Julia piteously entreated me, for my future wife’s sake, not to take
service under Government. As for the Admiralty, she said, it had no
characteristic but the abominable one, that it hated a woman. The
squire laid two or three moderately coarse traps for the voluble frank
creature, which she evaded with surprising neatness, showing herself
more awake than one would have imagined her. Janet and I fancied she
must have come with the intention to act uxorious husband and Irish wife
for the distinct purpose of diverting the squire’s wrath from me, for he
greatly delighted in the sight of merry wedded pairs. But they were as
simple as possible in their display of happiness.

It chanced that they came opportunely. My bankers’ book had been the
theme all the morning, and an astonishing one to me equally with my
grandfather: Since our arrival in England, my father had drawn nine
thousand pounds. The sums expended during our absence on the Continent
reached the perplexing figures of forty-eight thousand. I knew it too
likely, besides, that all debts were not paid. Self--self--self drew for
thousands at a time; sometimes, as the squire’s convulsive forefinger
indicated, for many thousands within a week. It was incomprehensible to
him until I, driven at bay by questions and insults, and perceiving that
concealment could not long be practised, made a virtue of the situation
by telling him (what he in fact must have seen) that my father possessed
a cheque-book as well as I, and likewise drew upon the account. We
had required the money; it was mine, and I had sold out Bank Stock and
Consols,--which gave very poor interest, I remarked cursorily-and
had kept the money at my bankers’, to draw upon according to our
necessities. I pitied the old man while speaking. His face was livid;
language died from his lips. He asked to have little things explained
to him--the two cheque-books, for instance,--and what I thought of doing
when this money was all gone: for he supposed I did not expect the same
amount to hand every two years; unless, he added, I had given him no
more than a couple of years’ lease of life when I started for my tour.
‘Then the money’s gone!’ he summed up; and this was the signal for
redemanding explanations. Had he not treated me fairly and frankly in
handing over my own to me on the day of my majority? Yes.

‘And like a fool, you think--eh?’

‘I have no such thought in my head, sir.’

‘You have been keeping that fellow in his profligacy, and you ‘re
keeping him now. Why, you ‘re all but a beggar!... Comes to my house,
talks of his birth, carries off my daughter, makes her mad, lets her
child grow up to lay hold of her money, and then grips him fast and
pecks him, fleeces him!... You ‘re beggared--d ‘ye know that? He’s had
the two years of you, and sucked you dry. What were you about? What were
you doing? Did you have your head on? You shared cheque-books? good!...
The devil in hell never found such a fool as you! You had your house
full of your foreign bonyrobers--eh? Out with it! How did you pass your
time? Drunk and dancing?’

By such degrees my grandfather worked himself up to the pitch for his
style of eloquence. I have given a faint specimen of it. When I took the
liberty to consider that I had heard enough, he followed me out of the
library into the hall, where Janet stood. In her presence, he charged
the princess and her family with being a pack of greedy adventurers,
conspirators with ‘that fellow’ to plunder me; and for a proof of it, he
quoted my words, that my father’s time had been spent in superintending
the opening of a coal-mine on Prince Ernest’s estate. ‘That fellow
pretending to manage a coal-mine!’ Could not a girl see it was a shuffle
to hoodwink a greenhorn? And now he remembered it was Colonel Goodwin
and his daughter who had told him of having seen ‘the fellow’ engaged
in playing Court-buffoon to a petty German prince, and performing his
antics, cutting capers like a clown at a fair.

‘Shame!’ said Janet.

‘Hear her!’ The squire turned to me.

But she cried: ‘Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don’t, be silent. If
Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another. Don’t rob
me of my love for you: I haven’t much besides that.’

‘No, because of a scoundrel and his young idiot!’

Janet frowned in earnest, and said: ‘I don’t permit you to change the
meaning of the words I speak.’

He muttered a proverb of the stables. Reduced to behave temperately, he
began the whole history of my bankers’ book anew--the same queries, the
same explosions and imprecations.

‘Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,’ said Janet.

I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity;
and the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous
independence in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax. ‘You
won’t go out and walk with her? You shall go down on your knees to her
and beg her to give you her arm for a walk. By God! you shall, now,
here, on the spot, or off you go to your German princess, with your
butler’s legacy, and nothing more from me but good-bye and the door
bolted. Now, down with you!’

He expected me to descend.

‘And if he did, he would never have my arm.’ Janet’s eyes glittered hard
on the squire.

‘Before that rascal dies, my dear, he shall whine like a beggar out in
the cold for the tips of your fingers!’

‘Not if he asks me first,’ said Janet.

This set him off again. He realized her prospective generosity, and
contrasted it with my actual obtuseness. Janet changed her tactics. She
assumed indifference. But she wanted experience, and a Heriot to help
her in playing a part. She did it badly--overdid it; so that the old
man, now imagining both of us to be against his scheme for uniting us,
counted my iniquity as twofold. Her phrase, ‘Harry and I will always
be friends,’ roused the loudest of his denunciations upon me, as though
there never had been question of the princess, so inveterate was his
mind’s grasp of its original designs. Friends! Would our being friends
give him heirs by law to his estate and name? And so forth. My
aunt Dorothy came to moderate his invectives. In her room the
heavily-burdened little book of figures was produced, and the items read
aloud; and her task was to hear them without astonishment, but with
a business-like desire to comprehend them accurately, a method that
softened the squire’s outbursts by degrees. She threw out hasty running
commentaries: ‘Yes, that was for a yacht’; and ‘They were living at the
Court of a prince’; such and such a sum was ‘large, but Harry knew his
grandfather did not wish him to make a poor appearance.’

‘Why, do you mean to swear to me, on your oath, Dorothy Beltham,’ said
the squire, amazed at the small amazement he created ‘you think these
two fellows have been spending within the right margin? What’ll be
women’s ideas next!’

‘No,’ she answered demurely. ‘I think Harry has been extravagant, and
has had his lesson. And surely it is better now than later? But you are,
not making allowances for his situation as the betrothed of a princess.’

‘That ‘s what turns your head,’ said he; and she allowed him to have the
notion, and sneer at herself and her sex.

‘How about this money drawn since he came home?’ the squire persisted.

My aunt Dorothy reddened. He struck his finger on the line marking the
sum, repeating his demand; and at this moment Captain Bulsted and Julia
arrived. The ladies manoeuvred so that the captain and the squire were
left alone together. Some time afterward the captain sent out word that
he begged his wife’s permission to stay to dinner at the Grange, and
requested me to favour him by conducting his wife to Bulsted: proof, as
Julia said, that the two were engaged in a pretty hot tussle. She was
sure her William would not be the one to be beaten.

I led her away, rather depressed by the automaton performance assigned
to me; from which condition I awoke with a touch of horror to find
myself paying her very warm compliments; for she had been coquettish and
charming to cheer me, and her voice was sweet. We reached a point in our
conversation I know not where, but I must have spoken with some warmth.
‘Then guess,’ said she, ‘what William is suffering for your sake now,
Harry’; that is, ‘suffering in remaining away from me on your account’;
and thus, in an instant, with a skill so intuitive as to be almost
unconscious, she twirled me round to a right sense of my position, and
set me reflecting, whether a love that clad me in such imperfect armour
as to leave me penetrable to these feminine graces--a plump figure,
swinging skirts, dewy dark eyelids, laughing red lips--could indeed be
absolute love. And if it was not love of the immortal kind, what was
I? I looked back on the thought like the ship on its furrow through the
waters, and saw every mortal perplexity, and death under. My love of
Ottilia delusion? Then life was delusion! I contemplated Julia in alarm,
somewhat in the light fair witches were looked on when the faggots were
piled for them. The sense of her unholy attractions abased and mortified
me: and it set me thinking on the strangeness of my disregard of Mdlle.
Jenny Chassediane when in Germany, who was far sprightlier, if not
prettier, and, as I remembered, had done me the favour to make discreet
play with her eyelids in our encounters, and long eyes in passing. I
caught myself regretting my coldness of that period; for which regrets I
could have swung the scourge upon my miserable flesh. Ottilia’s features
seemed dying out of my mind. ‘Poor darling Harry!’ Julia sighed. ‘And
d’ ye know, the sight of a young man far gone in love gives me
the trembles?’ I rallied her concerning the ladder scene in my old
schooldays, and the tender things she had uttered to Heriot. She
answered, ‘Oh, I think I got them out of poets and chapters about
lovemaking, or I felt it very much. And that’s what I miss in William;
he can’t talk soft nice nonsense. I believe him, he would if he could,
but he ‘s like a lion of the desert--it ‘s a roar!’

I rejoiced when we heard the roar. Captain Bulsted returned to take
command of his ship, not sooner than I wanted him, and told us of a
fierce tussle with the squire. He had stuck to him all day, and up to
11 P.M. ‘By George! Harry, he had to make humble excuses to dodge out
of eyeshot a minute. Conquered him over the fourth bottle! And now all’s
right. He’ll see your dad. “In a barn?” says the squire. “Here ‘s to
your better health, sir,” I bowed to him; “gentlemen don’t meet in
barns; none but mice and traps make appointments there.” To shorten
my story, my lad, I have arranged for the squire and your excellent
progenitor to meet at Bulsted: we may end by bringing them over a bottle
of old Greg’s best. “See the boy’s father,” I kept on insisting. The
point is, that this confounded book must be off your shoulders, my lad.
A dirty dog may wash in a duck-pond. You see, Harry, the dear old squire
may set up your account twenty times over, but he has a right to know
how you twirl the coin. He says you don’t supply the information. I
suggest to him that your father can, and will. So we get them into a
room together. I’ll be answerable for the rest. And now top your boom,
and to bed here: off in the morning and tug the big vessel into port
here! And, Harry, three cheers, and another bottle to crown the victory,
if you ‘re the man for it?’

Julia interposed a decided negative to the proposal; an ordinarily
unlucky thing to do with bibulous husbands, and the captain looked
uncomfortably checked; but when he seemed to be collecting to assert
himself, the humour of her remark, ‘Now, no bravado, William,’ disarmed
him.

‘Bravado, my sweet chuck?’

‘Won’t another bottle be like flashing your sword after you’ve won the
day?’ said she.

He slung his arm round her, and sent a tremendous whisper into my
ear--‘A perfect angel!’

I started for London next day, more troubled aesthetically regarding the
effect produced on me by this order of perfect angels than practically
anxious about material affairs, though it is true that when I came into
proximity with my father, the thought of his all but purely mechanical
power of making money spin, fly, and vanish, like sparks from a
fire-engine, awakened a serious disposition in me to bring our monetary
partnership to some definite settlement. He was living in splendour,
next door but one to the grand establishment he had driven me to from
Dipwell in the old days, with Mrs. Waddy for his housekeeper once
more, Alphonse for his cook. Not living on the same scale, however,
the troubled woman said. She signified that it was now the whirlwind. I
could not help smiling to see how proud she was of him, nevertheless, as
a god-like charioteer--in pace, at least.

‘Opera to-night,’ she answered my inquiries for him, admonishing me by
her tone that I ought not to be behindhand in knowing his regal rules
and habits. Praising his generosity, she informed me that he had spent
one hundred pounds, and offered a reward of five times the sum, for the
discovery of Mabel Sweetwinter. ‘Your papa never does things by halves,
Mr. Harry!’ Soon after she was whimpering, ‘Oh, will it last?’ I
was shown into the room called ‘The princess’s room,’ a miracle of
furniture, not likely to be occupied by her, I thought, the very
magnificence of the apartment striking down hope in my heart like cold
on a nerve. Your papa says the whole house is to be for you, Mr. Harry,
when the happy day comes.’ Could it possibly be that he had talked of
the princess? I took a hasty meal and fortified myself with claret to
have matters clear with him before the night was over.



CHAPTER XXXIX. I SEE MY FATHER TAKING THE TIDE AND AM CARRIED ON IT MYSELF

My father stood in the lobby of the Opera, holding a sort of open court,
it appeared to me, for a cluster of gentlemen hung round him; and I had
presently to bow to greetings which were rather of a kind to flatter me,
leading me to presume that he was respected as well as marvelled at. The
names of Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn, Mr. Jennings, Lord Alton, Sir Weeton
Slater, Mr. Monterez Williams, Admiral Loftus, the Earl of Witlington,
were among those which struck my ear, and struck me as good ones. I
could not perceive anything of the air of cynical satellites in these
gentlemen--on the contrary, they were cordially deferential. I felt that
he was encompassed by undoubted gentlemen, and my warmer feelings to my
father returned when I became sensible of the pleasant sway he held over
the circle, both in speaking and listening. His sympathetic smile and
semi-droop of attention; his readiness, when occasion demanded it, to
hit the key of the subject and help it on with the right word; his air
of unobtrusive appreciation; his sensibility to the moment when the
run of conversation depended upon him--showed inimitable art coming of
natural genius; and he did not lose a shade of his superior manner the
while. Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn, professionally voluble, a lively talker,
brimming with anecdote, but too sparkling, too prompt, too full of
personal relish of his point, threw my father’s urbane supremacy into
marked relief; and so in another fashion did the Earl of Witlington, ‘a
youth in the season of guffaws,’ as Jorian DeWitt described him, whom
a jest would seize by the throat, shaking his sapling frame. Jorian
strolled up to us goutily. No efforts of my father’s would induce him
to illustrate his fame for repartee, so it remained established. ‘Very
pretty waxwork,’ he said to me of our English beauties swimming by.
‘Now, those women, young Richmond, if they were inflammable to the
fiftieth degree, that is, if they had the fiftieth part of a Frenchwoman
in them, would have canvassed society on the great man’s account long
before this, and sent him to the top like a bubble. He wastes his time
on them. That fat woman he’s bowing to is Viscountess Sedley, a porcine
empress, widow of three, with a soupcon of bigamy to flavour them.
She mounted from a grocer’s shop, I am told. Constitution has done
everything for that woman. So it will everywhere--it beats the world!
Now he’s on all-fours to Lady Rachel Stokes, our pure aristocracy;
she walks as if she were going through a doorway, and couldn’t risk
an eyelid. I ‘d like to see her tempting St. Anthony. That’s little
Wreckham’s wife: she’s had as many adventures as Gil Blas before he
entered the Duke of Lerma’s service.’ He reviewed several ladies,
certainly not very witty when malignant, as I remembered my father to
have said of him. ‘The style of your Englishwoman is to keep the nose
exactly at one elevation, to show you’re born to it. They daren’t run a
gamut, these women. These Englishwomen are a fiction! The model of them
is the nursery-miss, but they’re like the names of true lovers cut on
the bark of a tree--awfully stiff and longitudinal with the advance
of time. We’ve our Lady Jezebels, my boy! They’re in the pay of the
bishops, or the police, to make vice hideous. The rest do the same for
virtue, and get their pay for it somewhere, I don’t doubt; perhaps from
the newspapers, to keep up the fiction. I tell you, these Englishwomen
have either no life at all in them, or they’re nothing but animal life.
‘Gad, how they dizen themselves! They’ve no other use for their fingers.
The wealth of this country’s frightful!’

Jorian seemed annoyed that he could not excite me to defend my
countrywomen; but I had begun to see that there was no necessity for
the sanguine to encounter the bilious on their behalf, and was myself
inclined to be critical. Besides I was engaged in watching my father,
whose bearing toward the ladies he accosted did not dissatisfy my
critical taste, though I had repeated fears of seeing him overdo it. He
summoned me to an introduction to the Countess Szezedy, a merry little
Hungarian dame.

‘So,’ said she at once, speaking German, ‘you are to marry the romantic
head, the Princess Ottilia of Eppenwelzen! I know her well. I have met
her in Vienna. Schone Seele, and bas bleu! It’s just those that are won
with a duel. I know Prince Otto too.’ She prattled away, and asked
me whether the marriage was to take place in the Summer. I was too
astounded to answer.

‘No date is yet fixed,’ my father struck in.

‘It’s the talk of London,’ she said.

Before I could demand explanations of my father with regard to this
terrible rumour involving Ottilia, I found myself in the box of the
City widow, Lady Sampleman, a grievous person, of the complexion of the
autumnal bramble-leaf, whose first words were: ‘Ah! the young suitor!
And how is our German princess?’ I had to reply that the theme was more
of German princes than princesses in England. ‘Oh! but,’ said she, ‘you
are having a--shall I call it--national revenge on them? “I will take
one of your princesses,” says you; and as soon as said done! I’m dying
for a sight of her portrait. Captain DeWitt declares her heavenly--I
mean, he says she is fair and nice, quite a lady-that of course! And
never mind her not being rich. You can do the decoration to the match.
H’m,’ she perused my features; ‘pale! Lovelorn? Excuse an old friend of
your father’s. One of his very oldest, I’d say, if it didn’t
impugn. As such, proud of your alliance. I am. I speak of it
everywhere--everywhere.’

Here she dramatized the circulation of the gossip. ‘Have you heard
the news? No, what? Fitz-George’s son marries a princess of the German
realm. Indeed! True as gospel. And how soon? In a month; and now you
will see the dear, neglected man command the Court....’

I looked at my father: I felt stifling with confusion and rage. He leant
over to her, imparting some ecstatic news about a great lady having
determined to call on her to regulate the affairs of an approaching
grand Ball, and under cover of this we escaped.

‘If it were not,’ said he, ‘for the Chassediane--you are aware, Richie,
poor Jorian is lost to her?--he has fallen at her quicksilver feet. She
is now in London. Half the poor fellow’s income expended in bouquets!
Her portrait, in the character of the widow Lefourbe, has become a part
of his dressing apparatus; he shaves fronting her playbill. His first
real affaire de coeur, and he is forty-five! So he is taken in the
stomach. That is why love is such a dangerous malady for middle age. As
I said, but for Jenny Chassediane, our Sampleman would be the fortune
for Jorian. I have hinted it on both sides. Women, Richie, are cleverer
than the illustrious Lord Nelson in not seeing what their inclinations
decline to see, and Jorian would do me any service in the world except
that one. You are restless, my son?’

I begged permission to quit the house, and wait for him outside. He, in
return, begged me most urgently to allow myself to be introduced to Lady
Edbury, the stepmother of Lord Destrier, now Marquis of Edbury; and,
using conversational pressure, he adjured me not to slight this lady,
adding, with more significance than the words conveyed, ‘I am taking
the tide, Richie.’ The tide took me, and I bowed to a lady of impressive
languor, pale and young, with pleasant manners, showing her character
in outline, like a glove on the hand, but little of its quality. She
accused my father of coming direct from ‘that person’s’ box. He replied
that he never forsook old friends. ‘You should,’ was her rejoinder. It
suggested to me an image of one of the sister Fates cutting a thread.

My heart sank when, from Lady Edbury too, I heard the allusion to
Germany and its princess. ‘Some one told me she was dark?’

‘Blonde,’ my father corrected the report.

Lady Edbury ‘thought it singular for a German woman of the Blood to be a
brunette. They had not much dark mixture among them, particularly in the
North. Her name? She had forgotten the name of the princess.’

My father repeated: ‘The Princess Ottilia, Princess of
Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.’

‘Brunette, you say?’

‘The purest blonde.’

‘A complexion?’

‘A complexion to dazzle the righteous!’

Lady Edbury threw a flying glance in a mirror: ‘The unrighteous you
leave to us then?’

They bandied the weariful shuttlecock of gallantry. I bowed and fled. My
excuse was that I had seen Anna Penrhys in an upper tier of boxes, and I
made my way to her, doubting how I should be welcomed. ‘The happy woman
is a German princess, we hear!’ she set me shivering. Her welcome was
perfectly unreserved and friendly.

She asked the name of the lady whose box I had quitted, and after
bending her opera-glass on it for a moment, said, with a certain air of
satisfaction, ‘She is young’; which led me to guess that Lady Edbury was
reputed to be Anna’s successor; but why the latter should be flattered
by the former’s youth was one of the mysteries for me then. Her aunt was
awakened from sleep by the mention of my name. ‘Is the man here?’ she
exclaimed, starting. Anna smiled, and talked to me of my father, saying,
that she was glad to see me at his right hand, for he had a hard battle
to fight. She spoke of him with affectionate interest in his fortunes;
no better proof of his generosity as well as hers could have been
given me. I promised her heartily I would not be guilty of letting our
intimacy drop, and handed the ladies down to the crush-room, where I saw
my father leading Lady Edbury to her carriage, much observed. Destrier,
the young marquis, coming in to meet the procession from other haunts,
linked his arm to his friend Witlington’s, and said something in
my hearing of old ‘Duke Fitz,’ which provoked, I fancied, signs
of amusement equivalent to tittering in a small ring of the select
assembly. Lady Sampleman’s carriage was called. ‘Another victim,’ said a
voice. Anna Penrhys walked straight out to find her footman and carriage
for herself.

I stood alone in the street, wondering, fretting, filled with a variety
of ugly sensations, when my father joined me humming an air of the
opera. ‘I was looking for Jorian, Richie. He had our Sampleman under his
charge. He is off to the Chassediane. Well! And well, Richie, you could
not bear the absence from your dada? You find me in full sail on the
tide. I am at home, if our fortunes demand it, in a little German
principality, but there is,’ he threw out his chest, ‘a breadth in
London; nowhere else do I breathe with absolute freedom--so largely: and
this is my battlefield. By the way, Lady Edbury accounts you complete;
which is no more to say than that she is a woman of taste. The instance:
she positively would not notice that you wear a dress-coat of a foreign
cut. Correct it to-morrow; my tailor shall wait on you. I meant to point
out to you that when a London woman has not taken note of that, the face
and the man have made the right impression on her. Richie, dear boy,
how shall I speak the delight I have in seeing you! My arm in yours, old
Richie! strolling home from the Fashion: this seems to me what I dreamt
of! All in sound health at the Grange? She too, the best of women?’

‘I have come on very particular business,’ I interposed briefly.

He replied, ‘I am alive to you, Richie; speak.’

‘The squire has seen my bankers’ book. He thinks I’ve been drawing
rather wildly: no doubt he’s right. He wants some sort of explanation.
He consents to an interview with you. I have come to ask you to go down
to him, sir.’

‘To-morrow morning, without an hour’s delay, my dear boy. Very agreeable
will be the sight of old Riversley. And in the daylight!’

‘He prefers to meet you at Bulsted. Captain Bulsted offers his house
for the purpose. I have to warn you, sir, that we stand in a very
exceptional position. The squire insists upon having a full account of
the money rendered to him.’

‘I invite him to London, Richie. I refer him to Dettermain and Newson. I
request him to compute the value of a princess.’

‘You are aware that he will not come to your invitation.’

‘Tell me, then, how is he to understand what I have established by the
expenditure, my son? I refer him to Dettermain and Newson.’

‘But you must know that he sets his face against legal proceedings
involving exposure.’

‘But surely, Richie, exposure is the very thing we court. The innocent,
the unjustly treated, court it. We would be talked about; you shall hear
of us! And into the bargain an hereditary princess. Upon my faith, Mr.
Beltham, I think you have mighty little to complain of.’

My temper was beginning to chafe at the curb. ‘As regards any feeling
about the money, personally, sir, you know I have none. But I must speak
of one thing. I have heard to-night, I confess with as much astonishment
as grief, the name... I could not have guessed that I should hear the
princess’s name associated with mine, and quite openly.’

‘As a matter of course.’ He nodded, and struck out a hand in wavy
motion.

‘Well, sir, if you can’t feel for her or her family, be good enough to
think of me, and remember that I object to it.’

‘For you all,’ said he, buoyantly; ‘I feel for you all, and I will act
for you all. I bring the princess to your arms, my dear boy. You have
written me word that the squire gives her a royal dowry--have you not?
My combinations permit of no escape to any one of you. Nay, ‘tis done.
I think for you--I feel for you--I act for you. By heaven, you shall be
happy! Sigh, Richie, sigh; your destiny is now entrusted to me!’

‘I daresay I’m wasting my breath, sir, but I protest against false
pretences. You know well that you have made use of the princess’s name
for your own purposes.’

‘Most indubitably, Richie, I have; and are they not yours? I must
have social authority to succeed in our main enterprise. Possibly the
princess’s name serves for a temporary chandelier to cast light on us.
She belongs to us. For her sake, we are bringing the house she enters
into order. Thus, Richie, I could tell Mr. Beltham: you and he supply
the money, the princess the name, and I the energy, the skilfulness, and
the estimable cause. I pay the princess for the use of her name with the
dowry, which is royal; I pay you with the princess, who is royal too;
and I, Richie, am paid by your happiness most royally. Together, it is
past contest that we win.--Here, my little one,’ he said to a woman,
and dropped a piece of gold into her hand, ‘on condition that you go
straight home.’ The woman thanked him and promised. ‘As I was observing,
we are in the very tide of success. Curious! I have a slight inclination
to melancholy. Success, quotha? Why, hundreds before us have paced the
identical way homeward at night under these lamps between the mansions
and the park. The bare thought makes them resemble a double line of
undertakers. The tomb is down there at the end of them--costly or not.
At the age of four, on my birthday, I was informed that my mother lay
dead in her bed. I remember to this day my astonishment at her not
moving. “Her heart is broken,” my old nurse said. To me she appeared
intact. Her sister took possession of me, and of her papers, and the
wedding-ring--now in the custody of Dettermain and Newson--together with
the portraits of both my parents; and she, poor soul, to sustain me, as
I verily believe--she had a great idea of my never asking unprofitably
for anything in life--bartered the most corroborative of the
testificatory documents, which would now make the establishment of
my case a comparatively light task. Have I never spoken to you of my
boyhood? My maternal uncle was a singing-master and master of elocution.
I am indebted to him for the cultivation of my voice. He taught me an
effective delivery of my sentences. The English of a book of his called
The Speaker is still to my mind a model of elegance. Remittances of
money came to him from an unknown quarter; and, with a break or two,
have come ever since up to this period. My old nurse-heaven bless
her--resumed the occupation of washing. I have stood by her tub, Richie,
blowing bubbles and listening to her prophecies of my exalted fortune
for hours. On my honour, I doubt, I seriously doubt, if I have ever
been happier. I depend just now--I have to avow it to you--slightly upon
stimulants... of a perfectly innocuous character. Mrs. Waddy will allow
me a pint of champagne. The truth is, Richie--you see these two or three
poor pensioners of mine, honi soit qui mal y pense--my mother has had
hard names thrown at her. The stones of these streets cry out to me to
have her vindicated. I am not tired; but I want my wine.’

He repeated several times before he reached his housedoor, that he
wanted his wine, in a manner to be almost alarming. His unwonted effort
of memory, the singular pictures of him which it had flashed before me,
and a sort of impatient compassion, made me forget my wrath. I saw him
take his restorative at one draught. He lay down on a sofa, and his
valet drew his boots off and threw a cloak over him. Lying there, he
wished me gaily good-night. Mrs. Waddy told me that he had adopted this
system of sleeping for the last month. ‘Bless you, as many people call
on him at night now as in the day,’ she said; and I was induced to
suppose he had some connection with the Press. She had implicit faith in
his powers of constitution, and would affirm, that he had been the death
of dozens whom the attraction had duped to imitate his habits. ‘He is
now a Field-Marshal on his campaign.’ She betrayed a twinkle of humour.
He must himself have favoured her with that remark. The report of the
house-door frequently shutting in the night suggested the passage of his
aides-de-camp.

Early in the morning, I found him pacing through the open doors of the
dining-room and the library dictating to a secretary at a desk, now and
then tossing a word to Dettermain and Newson’s chief clerk. The floor
was strewn with journals. He wore Hessian boots; a voluminous black
cloak hung loosely from his shoulders.

‘I am just settling the evening papers,’ he said after greeting me, with
a show of formality in his warmth; and immediately added, ‘That will do,
Mr. Jopson. Put in a note--“Mr. Harry Lepel Richmond of Riversley and
Twn-y-glas, my son, takes no step to official distinction in his native
land save through the ordinary Parliamentary channels.” Your pardon,
Richie; presently. I am replying to a morning paper.’

‘What’s this? Why print my name?’ I cried.

‘Merely the correction of an error. I have to insist, my dear boy, that
you claim no privileges: you are apart from them. Mr. Jopson, I
beseech you, not a minute’s delay in delivering that. Fetch me from
the printer’s my pamphlet this afternoon. Mr. Jacobs, my compliments to
Dettermain and Newson: I request them to open proceedings instanter, and
let the world know of it. Good-morning, gentlemen.’

And now, turning to me, my father fenced me with the whole weight of his
sententious volubility, which was the force of a river. Why did my name
appear in the papers? Because I was his son. But he assured me that he
carefully separated me from public companionship with his fortunes,
and placed me on the side of my grandfather, as a plain gentleman of
England, the heir of the most colossal wealth possible in the country.

‘I dis-sociate you from me, Richie, do you see? I cause it to be
declared that you need, on no account, lean on me. Jopson will bring
you my pamphlet--my Declaration of Rights--to peruse. In the Press, in
Literature, at Law, and on social ground, I meet the enemy, and I
claim my own; by heaven, I do! And I will down to the squire for a
distraction, if you esteem it necessary, certainly. Half-a-dozen words
to him. Why, do you maintain him to be insensible to a title for you?
No, no. And ask my friends. I refer him to any dozen of my friends to
convince him I have the prize almost in my possession. Why, dear boy, I
have witnesses, living witnesses, to the ceremony. Am I, tell me, to be
deprived of money now, once again, for the eleventh time? Oh! And put
aside my duty to you, I protest I am bound in duty to her who bore
me--you have seen her miniature: how lovely that dear woman was! how
gentle!--bound in duty to her to clear her good name. This does not
affect you...’

‘Oh, but it does,’ he allowed me to plead.

‘Ay, through your love for your dada.’

He shook me by both hands. I was touched with pity, and at the same
time in doubt whether it was not an actor that swayed me; for I was
discontented, and could not speak my discontent; I was overborne,
overflowed. His evasion of the matter of my objections relating to
the princess I felt to be a palpable piece of artfulness, but I had to
acknowledge to myself that I knew what his argument would be, and how
overwhelmingly his defence of it would spring forth. My cowardice
shrank from provoking a recurrence to the theme. In fact, I submitted
consciously to his masterful fluency and emotional power, and so I
was carried on the tide with him, remaining in London several days to
witness that I was not the only one. My father, admitting that money
served him in his conquest of society, and defying any other man to do
as much with it as he did, replied to a desperate insinuation of mine,
‘This money I spend I am actually putting out to interest as much as,
or more than, your grandad.’ He murmured confidentially, ‘I have alarmed
the Government. Indeed, I have warrant for saying I am in communication
with its agents. They are bribing me; they are positively bribing me,
Richie. I receive my stipend annually. They are mighty discreet. So am
I. But I push them hard. I take what they offer: I renounce none of my
claims.’

Janet wrote that it would be prudent for me to return.

‘I am prepared,’ my father said. ‘I have only to meet Mr. Beltham in a
room--I stipulate that it shall be between square walls--to win him.
The squire to back us, Richie, we have command of the entire world. His
wealth, and my good cause, and your illustrious union--by the way, it is
announced definitely in this morning’s paper.’

Dismayed, I asked what was announced.

‘Read,’ said he. ‘This will be something to hand to Mr. Beltham at our
meeting. I might trace it to one of the embassies, Imperial or Royal. No
matter--there it is.’

I read a paragraph in which Ottilia’s name and titles were set down;
then followed mine and my wealthy heirship, and--woe was me in the
perusing of it!--a roundabout vindication of me as one not likely to be
ranked as the first of English commoners who had gained the hand of an
hereditary foreign princess, though it was undoubtedly in the light of
a commoner that I was most open to the congratulations of my countrymen
upon my unparalleled felicity. A display of historical erudition
cited the noble inferiors by birth who had caught princesses to their
arms--Charles, Humphrey, William, John. Under this list, a later Harry!

The paragraph closed by fixing the nuptials to take place before the end
of the Season.

I looked at my father to try a struggle with him. The whole man was
efflorescent.

‘Can’t it be stopped?’ I implored him.

He signified the impossibility in a burst of gesticulations, motions
of the mouth, smiling frowns; various patterns of an absolute negative
beating down opposition.

‘Things printed can never be stopped, Richie. Our Jorian compares them
to babies baptized. They have a soul from that moment, and go on for
ever!--an admirable word of Jorian’s. And a word to you, Richie. Will
you swear to me by the veracity of your lover’s heart, that paragraph
affords you no satisfaction? He cannot swear it!’ my father exclaimed,
seeing me swing my shoulder round, and he made me feel that it would
have been a false oath if I had sworn it. But I could have sworn, that I
had rather we two were at the bottom of the sea than that it should come
under the princess’s eyes. I read it again. It was in print. It looked
like reality. It was at least the realization of my dream. But this
played traitor and accused me of being crowned with no more than a
dream. The sole practical thing I could do was to insist on our starting
for Riversley immediately, to make sure of my own position. ‘Name your
hour, Richie,’ my father said confidently: and we waited.

A rather plainer view of my father’s position, as I inclined to think,
was afforded to me one morning at his breakfast-table, by a conversation
between him and Jorian DeWitt, who brought me a twisted pink note from
Mdlle. Chassediane, the which he delivered with the air of a dog made
to disgorge a bone, and he was very cool to me indeed. The cutlets of
Alphonse were subject to snappish criticism. ‘I assume,’ he said, ‘the
fellow knew I was coming?’

‘He saw it in my handwriting of yesterday,’ replied my father. ‘But be
just to him, acknowledge that he is one of the few that perform their
daily duties with a tender conscience.’

‘This English climate has bedevilled the fellow! He peppers his dishes
like a mongrel Indian reared on mangoes.’

‘Ring him up, ring him up, Jorian. All I beg of you is not to disgust
him with life, for he quits any service in the world to come to me, and,
in fact, he suits me.’

‘Exactly so: you spoil him.’

My father shrugged. ‘The state of the case is, that your stomach is
growing delicate, friend Jorian.’

‘The actual state of the case being, that my palate was never keener,
and consequently my stomach knows its business.’

‘You should have tried the cold turbot with oil and capers.’

‘Your man had better stick to buttered eggs, in my opinion.’

‘Say, porridge!’

‘No, I’ll be hanged if I think he’s equal to a bowl of porridge.’

‘Careme might have confessed to the same!’

‘With this difference,’ cried Jorian in a heat, ‘that he would never
have allowed the thought of any of your barbarous messes to occur to a
man at table. Let me tell you, Roy, you astonish me: up till now I have
never known you guilty of the bad taste of defending a bad dish on your
own board.’

‘Then you will the more readily pardon me, Jorian.’

‘Oh, I pardon you,’ Jorian sneered, tripped to the carpet by such
ignoble mildness. ‘A breakfast is no great loss.’

My father assured him he would have a serious conversation with
Alphonse, for whom he apologized by saying that Alphonse had not, to
his knowledge, served as hospital cook anywhere, and was therefore quite
possibly not sufficiently solicitous for appetites and digestions of
invalids.

Jorian threw back his head as though to discharge a spiteful sarcasm
with good aim; but turning to me, said, ‘Harry, the thing must be done;
your father must marry. Notoriety is the season for a pick and choice
of the wealthiest and the loveliest. I refuse to act the part of
warming-pan any longer; I refuse point blank. It’s not a personal
feeling on my part; my advice is that of a disinterested friend, and I
tell you candidly, Roy, set aside the absurd exhibition of my dancing
attendance on that last rose of Guildhall,--egad, the alderman went
like Summer, and left us the very picture of a fruity Autumn,--I say you
can’t keep her hanging on the tree of fond expectation for ever. She’ll
drop.’

‘Catch her, Jorian; you are on guard.’

‘Upwards of three hundred thousand, if a penny, Roy Richmond! Who? I? I
am not a fortune-hunter.’

‘Nor am I, friend Jorian.’

‘No, it ‘s because you’re not thorough: you ‘ll fall between the
stools.’

My father remarked that he should visit this upon Mr. Alphonse.

‘You shook off that fine Welsh girl, and she was in your hand--the act
of a madman!’ Jorian continued. ‘You’re getting older: the day will come
when you’re a flat excitement. You know the first Lady Edbury spoilt one
of your best chances when you had the market. Now you’re trifling with
the second. She’s the head of the Light Brigade, but you might fix her
down, if she’s not too much in debt. You ‘re not at the end of your run,
I dare say. Only, my good Roy, let me tell you, in life you mustn’t
wait for the prize of the race till you touch the goal--if you prefer
metaphor. You generally come forward about every seven years or so. Add
on another seven, and women’ll begin to think. You can’t beat Time, mon
Roy.’

‘So,’ said my father, ‘I touch the goal, and women begin to think, and I
can’t beat time to them. Jorian, your mind is in a state of confusion. I
do not marry.’

‘Then, Roy Richmond, hear what a friend says...’

‘I do not marry, Jorian, and you know my reasons.’

‘Sentiments!’

‘They are a part of my life.’

‘Just as I remarked, you are not thorough. You have genius and courage
out of proportion, and you are a dead failure, Roy; because, no sooner
have you got all Covent Garden before you for the fourth or fifth time,
than in go your hands into your pockets, and you say--No, there’s an
apple I can’t have, so I’ll none of these; and, by the way, the apple
must be tolerably withered by this time. And you know perfectly well
(for you don’t lack common sense at a shaking, Roy Richmond), that
you’re guilty of simple madness in refusing to make the best of your
situation. You haven’t to be taught what money means. With money--and
a wife to take care of it, mind you--you are pre-eminently the man for
which you want to be recognized. Without it--Harry ‘ll excuse me, I must
speak plainly--you’re a sort of a spectacle of a bob-cherry, down on
your luck, up on your luck, and getting dead stale and never bitten; a
familiar curiosity’

Jorian added, ‘Oh, by Jove! it’s not nice to think of.’ My father
said: ‘Harry, I am sure, will excuse you for talking, in your extreme
friendliness, of matters that he and I have not--and they interest us
deeply--yet thought fit to discuss. And you may take my word for it,
Jorian, that I will give Alphonse his medical dose. I am quite of your
opinion that the kings of cooks require it occasionally. Harry will
inform us of Mdlle. Chassediane’s commands.’

The contents of the letter permitted me to read it aloud. She desired to
know how she could be amused on the Sunday.

‘We will undertake it,’ said my father. ‘I depute the arrangements to
you, Jorian. Respect the prejudices, and avoid collisions, that is all.’

Captain DeWitt became by convenient stages cheerful, after the pink slip
of paper had been made common property, and from a seriously-advising
friend, in his state of spite, relapsed to the idle and shadow-like
associate, when pleased. I had to thank him for the gift of fresh
perceptions. Surely it would be as well if my father could get a woman
of fortune to take care of him!

We had at my request a consultation with Dettermain and Newson on the
eve of the journey to Riversley, Temple and Jorian DeWitt assisting.
Strange documentary evidence was unfolded and compared with the date of
a royal decree: affidavits of persons now dead; a ring, the ring; fans,
and lace, and handkerchiefs with notable initials; jewelry stamped ‘To
the Divine Anastasia’ from an adoring Christian name: old brown letters
that shrieked ‘wife’ when ‘charmer’ seemed to have palled; oaths
of fidelity ran through them like bass notes. Jorian held up the
discoloured sheets of ancient paper saying:

‘Here you behold the mummy of the villain Love.’ Such love as it
was--the love of the privileged butcher for the lamb. The burden of
the letters, put in epigram, was rattlesnake and bird. A narrative
of Anastasia’s sister, Elizabeth, signed and sealed, with names of
witnesses appended, related in brief bald English the history of the
events which had killed her. It warmed pathetically when dwelling on the
writer’s necessity to part with letters and papers of greater moment,
that she might be enabled to sustain and educate her sister’s child. She
named the certificate; she swore to the tampering with witnesses. The
number and exact indication of the house where the ceremony took place
was stated--a house in Soho;--the date was given, and the incident
on that night of the rape of the beautiful Miss Armett by mad Lord
Beaumaris at the theatre doors, aided by masked ruffians, after
Anastasia’s performance of Zamira.

‘There are witnesses I know to be still living, Mr. Temple,’ my father
said, seeing the young student-at-law silent and observant. ‘One of them
I have under my hand; I feed him. Listen to this.’

He read two or three insufferable sentences from one of the
love-epistles, and broke down. I was ushered aside by a member of the
firm to inspect an instrument prepared to bind me as surety for the
costs of the appeal. I signed it. We quitted the attorney’s office
convinced (I speak of Temple and myself) that we had seen the shadow of
something.



CHAPTER XL. MY FATHER’S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER

My father’s pleasure on the day of our journey to Bulsted was to drive
me out of London on a lofty open chariot, with which he made the circuit
of the fashionable districts, and caused innumerable heads to turn. I
would have preferred to go the way of other men, to be unnoticed, but
I was subject to an occasional glowing of undefined satisfaction in the
observance of the universally acknowledged harmony existing between his
pretensions, his tastes and habits, and his person. He contrived by
I know not what persuasiveness and simplicity of manner and speech to
banish from me the idea that he was engaged in playing a high stake; and
though I knew it, and he more than once admitted it, there was an ease
and mastery about him that afforded me some degree of positive comfort
still. I was still most securely attached to his fortunes. Supposing the
ghost of dead Hector to have hung over his body when the inflamed son of
Peleus whirled him at his chariot wheels round Troy, he would, with his
natural passions sobered by Erebus, have had some of my reflections upon
force and fate, and my partial sense of exhilaration in the tremendous
speed of the course during the whole of the period my father termed
his Grand Parade. I showed just such acquiescence or resistance as
were superinduced by the variations of the ground. Otherwise I was
spell-bound; and beyond interdicting any further public mention of my
name or the princess’s, I did nothing to thwart him. It would have been
no light matter.

We struck a station at a point half-way down to Bulsted, and found
little Kiomi there, thunder in her brows, carrying a bundle, and
purchasing a railway-ticket, not to travel in our direction. She gave
me the singular answer that she could not tell me where her people
were; nor would she tell me whither she was going, alone, and by rail. I
chanced to speak of Heriot. One of her sheet-lightning flashes shot out.
‘He won’t be at Bulsted,’ she said, as if that had a significance. I
let her know we were invited to Bulsted. ‘Oh, she ‘s at home’; Kiomi
blinked, and her features twitched like whip-cord. I saw that she was
possessed by one of her furies. That girl’s face had the art of making
me forget beautiful women, and what beauty was by comparison.

It happened that the squire came across us as we were rounding the
slope of larch and fir plantation near a part of the Riversley hollows,
leading to the upper heath-land, where, behind a semicircle of birches,
Bulsted lay. He was on horseback, and called hoarsely to the captain’s
coachman, who was driving us, to pull up. ‘Here, Harry,’ he sang out to
me, in the same rough voice, ‘I don’t see why we should bother Captain
William. It’s a bit of business, not pleasure. I’ve got the book in my
pocket. You ask--is it convenient to step into my bailiff’s cottage hard
by, and run through it? Ten minutes ‘ll tell me all I want to know. I
want it done with. Ask.’

My father stood up and bowed, bareheaded.

My grandfather struck his hat and bobbed.

‘Mr. Beltham, I trust I see you well.’

‘Better, sir, when I’ve got rid of a damned unpleasant bit o’ business.’

‘I offer you my hearty assistance.’

‘Do you? Then step down and come into my bailiff’s.’

‘I come, sir.’

My father alighted from the carriage. The squire cast his gouty leg to
be quit of his horse, but not in time to check my father’s advances and
ejaculations of condolence.

‘Gout, Mr. Beltham, is a little too much a proof to us of a long line of
ancestry.’

His hand and arm were raised in the form of a splint to support the
squire, who glared back over his cheekbone, horrified that he could
not escape the contact, and in too great pain from arthritic throes to
protest: he resembled a burglar surprised by justice. ‘What infernal
nonsense,... fellow talking now?’ I heard him mutter between his
hoppings and dancings, with one foot in the stirrup and a toe to earth,
the enemy at his heel, and his inclination half bent upon swinging to
the saddle again.

I went to relieve him. ‘Damn!... Oh, it’s you,’ said he.

The squire directed Uberly, acting as his groom, to walk his horse
up and down the turf fronting young Tom Eckerthy’s cottage, and me to
remain where I was; then hobbled up to the door, followed at a leisurely
march by my father. The door opened. My father swept the old man in
before him, with a bow and flourish that admitted of no contradiction,
and the door closed on them. I caught a glimpse of Uberly screwing his
wrinkles in a queer grimace, while he worked his left eye and thumb
expressively at the cottage, by way of communicating his mind to Samuel,
Captain Bulsted’s coachman; and I became quite of his opinion as to the
nature of the meeting, that it was comical and not likely to lead to
much. I thought of the princess and of my hope of her depending upon
such an interview as this. From that hour when I stepped on the sands
of the Continent to the day of my quitting them, I had been folded in a
dream: I had stretched my hands to the highest things of earth, and
here now was the retributive material money-question, like a keen
scythe-blade!

The cottage-door continued shut. The heaths were darkening. I heard a
noise of wheels, and presently the unmistakable voice of Janet saying,
‘That must be Harry.’ She was driving my aunt Dorothy. Both of them
hushed at hearing that the momentous duel was in progress. Janet’s first
thought was of the squire. ‘I won’t have him ride home in the dark,’
she said, and ordered Uberly to walk the horse home. The ladies had a
ladies’ altercation before Janet would permit my aunt to yield her place
and proceed on foot, accompanied by me. Naturally the best driver of the
two kept the whip. I told Samuel to go on to Bulsted, with word that we
were coming: and Janet, nodding bluntly, agreed to direct my father
as to where he might expect to find me on the Riversley road. My aunt
Dorothy and I went ahead slowly: at her request I struck a pathway
to avoid the pony-carriage, which was soon audible; and when Janet,
chattering to the squire, had gone by, we turned back to intercept
my father. He was speechless at the sight of Dorothy Beltham. At his
solicitation, she consented to meet him next day; his account of the
result of the interview was unintelligible to her as well as to me. Even
after leaving her at the park-gates, I could get nothing definite
from him, save that all was well, and that the squire was eminently
practical; but he believed he had done an excellent evening’s work.
‘Yes,’ said he, rubbing his hands, ‘excellent! making due allowances
for the emphatically commoner’s mind we have to deal with.’ And then to
change the subject he dilated on that strange story of the man who,
an enormous number of years back in the date of the world’s history,
carried his little son on his shoulders one night when the winds were
not so boisterous, though we were deeper in Winter, along the identical
road we traversed, between the gorsemounds, across the heaths, with
yonder remembered fir-tree clump in sight and the waste-water visible to
footfarers rounding under the firs. At night-time he vowed, that as
far as nature permitted it, he had satisfied the squire--‘completely
satisfied him, I mean,’ he said, to give me sound sleep. ‘No doubt of
it; no doubt of it, Richie.’

He won Julia’s heart straight off, and Captain Bulsted’s profound
admiration. ‘Now I know the man I’ve always been adoring since you were
so high, Harry,’ said she. Captain Bulsted sighed: ‘Your husband bows to
your high good taste, my dear.’ They relished him sincerely, and between
them and him I suffered myself to be dandled once more into a state of
credulity, until I saw my aunt Dorothy in the afternoon subsequent to
the appointed meeting. His deep respect and esteem for her had stayed
him from answering any of her questions falsely. To that extent he had
been veracious. It appeared, that driven hard by the squire, who
would have no waving of flags and lighting of fireworks in a matter of
business, and whose ‘commoner’s mind’ chafed sturdily at a hint of the
necessity for lavish outlays where there was a princess to win, he had
rallied on the fiction that many of the cheques, standing for the
bulk of the sums expended, were moneys borrowed by him of me, which he
designed to repay, and was prepared to repay instantly--could in fact,
the squire demanding it, repay, as it were, on the spot; for behold,
these borrowed moneys were not spent; they were moneys invested in
undertakings, put out to high rates of interest; moneys that perhaps it
would not be adviseable to call in without a season of delay; still, if
Mr. Beltham, acting for his grandson and heir, insisted, it should be
done. The moneys had been borrowed purely to invest them with profit on
my behalf: a gentleman’s word of honour was pledged to it.

The squire grimly gave him a couple of months to make it good.

Dorothy Beltham and my father were together for about an hour at
Eckerthy’s farm. She let my father kiss her hand when he was bending
to take his farewell of her, but held her face away. He was in manifest
distress, hardly master of his voice, begged me to come to him soon,
and bowing, with ‘God bless you, madam, my friend on earth!’ turned his
heel, bearing his elastic frame lamentably. A sad or a culprit air did
not befit him: one reckoned up his foibles and errors when seeing him
under a partly beaten aspect. At least, I did; not my dear aunt, who
was compassionate of him, however thoroughly she condemned his ruinous
extravagance, and the shifts and evasions it put him to. She feared,
that instead of mending the difficulty, he had postponed merely to
exaggerate it in the squire’s mind; and she was now of opinion that
the bringing him down to meet the squire was very bad policy, likely
to result in danger to my happiness; for, if the money should not
be forthcoming on the date named, all my father’s faults would be
transferred to me as his accomplice, both in the original wastefulness
and the subterfuges invented to conceal it. I recollected that a sum of
money had really been sunk in Prince Ernest’s coal-mine. My aunt said
she hoped for the best.

Mounting the heaths, we looked back on the long yellow road, where the
carriage conveying my father to the railway-station was visible, and
talked of him, and of the elements of antique tragedy in his history,
which were at that period, let me say, precisely what my incessant
mental efforts were strained to expel from the idea of our human life.
The individual’s freedom was my tenet of faith; but pity pleaded for him
that he was well-nigh irresponsible, was shamefully sinned against
at his birth, one who could charge the Gods with vindictiveness, and
complain of the persecution of natal Furies. My aunt Dorothy advised me
to take him under my charge, and sell his house and furniture, make him
live in bachelor chambers with his faithful waiting-woman and a single
manservant.

‘He will want money even to do that,’ I remarked.

She murmured, ‘Is there not some annual income paid to him?’

Her quick delicacy made her redden in alluding so closely to his
personal affairs, and I loved her for the nice feeling. ‘It was not
much,’ I said. The miserable attempt to repair the wrongs done to him
with this small annuity angered me--and I remembered, little pleased,
the foolish expectations he founded on this secret acknowledgement of
the justice of his claims. ‘We won’t talk of it,’ I pursued. ‘I wish he
had never touched it. I shall interdict him.’

‘You would let him pay his debts with it, Harry?’

‘I am not sure, aunty, that he does not incur a greater debt by
accepting it.’

‘One’s wish would be, that he might not ever be in need of it.’

‘Ay, or never be caring to find the key of it.’

‘That must be waste of time,’ she said.

I meant something else, but it was useless to tell her so.



CHAPTER XLI. COMMENCEMENT OF THE SPLENDOURS AND PERPLEXITIES OF MY FATHER’S GRAND
PARADE

Janet, in reply to our inquiries as to the condition of the squire’s
temper, pointed out in the newspaper a notification of a grand public
Ball to be given by my father, the first of a series of three, and
said that the squire had seen it and shrugged. She thought there was no
positive cause for alarm, even though my father should fail of his word;
but expressed her view decidedly, that it was an unfortunate move to
bring him between the squire and me, and so she blamed Captain Bulsted.
This was partly for the reason that the captain and his wife, charmed
by my father, were for advocating his merits at the squire’s table: our
ingenuity was ludicrously taxed to mystify him on the subject of their
extravagant eulogies. They told him they had been invited, and were
going to the great London Balls.

‘Subscription Balls?’ asked the squire.

‘No, sir,’ rejoined the captain.

‘Tradesmen’s Balls, d’ ye call ‘em, then?’

‘No, sir; they are Balls given by a distinguished gentleman.’

‘Take care it’s not another name for tradesmen’s Balls, William.’

‘I do not attend tradesmen’s Balls, sir.’

‘Take care o’ that, William.’

The captain was very angry. ‘What,’ said he, turning to us, ‘what does
the squire mean by telling an officer of the Royal Navy that he is
conducting his wife to a tradesmen’s Ball?’

Julia threatened malicious doings for the insult. She and the squire had
a controversy upon the explication of the word gentleman, she describing
my father’s appearance and manners to the life. ‘Now listen to me,
squire. A gentleman, I say, is one you’d say, if he wasn’t born a duke,
he ought to have been, and more shame to the title! He turns the key of
a lady’s heart with a twinkle of his eye. He ‘s never mean--what he has
is yours. He’s a true friend; and if he doesn’t keep his word, you know
in a jiffy it’s the fault of affairs; and stands about five feet eleven:
he’s a full-blown man’: and so forth.

The squire listened, and perspired at finding the object of his
abhorrence crowned thus in the unassailable realms of the abstract.
Julia might have done it more elegantly; but her husband was rapturous
over her skill in portraiture, and he added: ‘That’s a gentleman,
squire; and that ‘s a man pretty sure to be abused by half the world.’

‘Three-quarters, William,’ said the squire; ‘there’s about the
computation for your gentleman’s creditors, I suspect.’

‘Ay, sir; well,’ returned the captain, to whom this kind of fencing in
the dark was an affliction, ‘we make it up in quality--in quality.’

‘I ‘ll be bound you do,’ said the squire; ‘and so you will so long as
you ‘re only asked to dance to the other poor devils’ fiddling.’

Captain Bulsted bowed. ‘The last word to you, squire.’

The squire nodded. ‘I ‘ll hand it to your wife, William.’

Julia took it graciously. ‘A perfect gentleman! perfect! confound his
enemies!’

‘Why, ma’am, you might keep from swearing,’ the squire bawled.

‘La! squire,’ said she, ‘why, don’t you know the National Anthem?’

‘National Anthem, ma’am! and a fellow, a velvet-tongued--confound him,
if you like.’

‘And where’s my last word, if you please?’ Julia jumped up, and dropped
a provoking curtsey.

‘You silly old grandada!’ said Janet, going round to him; ‘don’t you see
the cunning woman wants to dress you in our garments, and means to boast
of it to us while you’re finishing your wine?’

The old man fondled her. I could have done the same, she bent over
him with such homely sweetness. ‘One comfort, you won’t go to these
gingerbread Balls,’ he said.

‘I’m not invited,’ she moaned comically.

‘No; nor shan’t be, while I can keep you out of bad company.’

‘But, grandada, I do like dancing.

‘Dance away, my dear; I’ve no objection.’

‘But where’s the music?’

‘Oh, you can always have music.’

‘But where are my partners?’

The squire pointed at me.

‘You don’t want more than one at a time, eh?’ He corrected his error:
‘No, the fellow’s engaged in another quadrille. Mind you, Miss Janet, he
shall dance to your tune yet. D’ ye hear, sir?’ The irritation excited
by Captain Bulsted and Julia broke out in fury. ‘Who’s that fellow
danced when Rome was burning?’

‘The Emperor Nero,’ said Janet. ‘He killed Harry’s friend Seneca in the
eighty-somethingth year of his age; an old man, and--hush, grandada!’
She could not check him.

‘Hark you, Mr. Harry; dance your hardest up in town with your rips and
reps, and the lot of ye; all very fine while the burning goes on: you
won’t see the fun of dancing on the ashes. A nice king of Rome Nero was
next morning! By the Lord, if I couldn’t swear you’ll be down on your
knees to an innocent fresh-hearted girl ‘s worth five hundred of the
crew you’re for partnering now while you’ve a penny for the piper.’

Janet shut his mouth, kissed him, and held his wine up. He drank, and
thumped the table. ‘We ‘ll have parties here, too. The girl shall have
her choice of partners: she shan’t be kept in the background by a young
donkey. Take any six of your own age, and six sensible men, to try you
by your chances. By George, the whole dozen ‘d bring you in non-compos.
You’ve only got the women on your side because of a smart face and
figure.’

Janet exclaimed indignantly, ‘Grandada, I’m offended with you’; and
walked out on a high step.

‘Come, if he has the women on his side,’ said Captain Bulsted, mildly.

‘He’ll be able to go partnering and gallopading as long as his banker
‘ll let him, William--like your gentleman! That’s true. We shall soon
see.’

‘I leave my character in your hands, sir,’ said I, rising. ‘If you would
scold me in private, I should prefer it, on behalf of your guests; but
I am bound to submit to your pleasure, and under any circumstances I
remember, what you appear to forget, that you are my grandfather.’

So saying, I followed the ladies. It was not the wisest of speeches, and
happened, Captain Bulsted informed me, to be delivered in my father’s
manner, for the squire pronounced emphatically that he saw very little
Beltham in me. The right course would have been for me to ask him then
and there whether I had his consent to start for Germany. But I was the
sport of resentments and apprehensions; and, indeed, I should not have
gone. I could not go without some title beyond that of the heir of great
riches.

Janet kept out of my sight. I found myself strangely anxious to console
her: less sympathetic, perhaps, than desirous to pour out my sympathy in
her ear, which was of a very pretty shape, with a soft unpierced lobe.
We danced together at the Riversley Ball, given by the squire on the
night of my father’s Ball in London. Janet complimented me upon having
attained wisdom. ‘Now we get on well,’ she said. ‘Grandada only wants to
see us friendly, and feel that I am not neglected.’

The old man, a martyr to what he considered due to his favourite,
endured the horror of the Ball until suppertime, and kept his eyes on
us two. He forgot, or pretended to forget, my foreign engagement
altogether, though the announcement in the newspapers was spoken of by
Sir Roderick and Lady Echester and others.

‘How do you like that?’ he remarked to me, seeing her twirled away by
one of the young Rubreys.

‘She seems to like it, sir,’ I replied.

‘Like it!’ said he. ‘In my day you wouldn’t have caught me letting the
bloom be taken off the girl I cared for by a parcel o’ scampish young
dogs. Right in their arms! Look at her build. She’s strong; she’s
healthy; she goes round like a tower. If you want a girl to look like a
princess!’

His eulogies were not undeserved. But she danced as lightly and happily
with Mr. Fred Rubrey as with Harry Richmond. I congratulated myself
on her lack of sentiment. Later, when in London, where Mlle. Jenny
Chassediane challenged me to perilous sarabandes, I wished that Janet
had ever so small a grain of sentiment, for a preservative to me.
Ottilia glowed high and distant; she sent me no message; her image did
not step between me and disorder. The whole structure of my idea of my
superior nature seemed to be crumbling to fragments; and beginning to
feel in despair that I was wretchedly like other men, I lost by degrees
the sense of my hold on her. It struck me that my worst fears of
the effect produced on the princess’s mind by that last scene in the
lake-palace must be true, and I abandoned hope. Temple thought she
tried me too cruelly. Under these circumstances I became less and
less resolutely disposed to renew the forlorn conflict with my father
concerning his prodigal way of living. ‘Let it last as long as I have a
penny to support him!’ I exclaimed. He said that Dettermain and Newson
were now urging on his case with the utmost despatch in order to keep
pace with him, but that the case relied for its life on his preserving
a great appearance. He handed me his division of our twin cheque-books,
telling me he preferred to depend on his son for supplies, and I was in
the mood to think this a partial security.

‘But you can take what there is,’ I said.

‘On the contrary, I will accept nothing but minor sums--so to speak,
the fractional shillings; though I confess I am always bewildered by
silver,’ said he.

I questioned him upon his means of carrying on his expenditure. His
answer was to refer to the pavement of the city of London. By paving
here and there he had, he informed me, made a concrete for the wheels to
roll on. He calculated that he now had credit for the space of three new
years--ample time for him to fight his fight and win his victory.

‘My tradesmen are not like the tradesmen of other persons,’ he broke
out with a curious neigh of supreme satisfaction in that retinue. ‘They
believe in me. I have de facto harnessed them to my fortunes; and if you
doubt me on the point of success, I refer you to Dettermain and Newson.
All I stipulate for is to maintain my position in society to throw a
lustre on my Case. So much I must do. My failures hitherto have been
entirely owing to the fact that I had not my son to stand by me.’

‘Then you must have money, sir.’

‘Yes, money.’

‘Then what can you mean by refusing mine?’

‘I admit the necessity for it, my son. Say you hand me a cheque for a
temporary thousand. Your credit and mine in conjunction can replace it
before the expiration of the two months. Or,’ he meditated, ‘it might be
better to give a bond or so to a professional lender, and preserve the
account at your bankers intact. The truth is, I have, in my interview
with the squire, drawn in advance upon the material success I have
a perfect justification to anticipate, and I cannot allow the old
gentleman to suppose that I retrench for the purpose of giving a large
array of figures to your bankers’ book. It would be sheer madness. I
cannot do it. I cannot afford to do it. When you are on a runaway horse,
I prefer to say a racehorse,--Richie, you must ride him. You dare not
throw up the reins. Only last night Wedderburn, appealing to Loftus,
a practical sailor, was approved when he offered--I forget the
subject-matter--the illustration of a ship on a lee-shore; you are lost
if you do not spread every inch of canvas to the gale. Retrenchment at
this particular moment is perdition. Count our gains, Richie. We have
won a princess...’

I called to him not to name her.

He persisted: ‘Half a minute. She is won; she is ours. And let me, in
passing,--bear with me one second--counsel you to write to Prince
Ernest instanter, proposing formally for his daughter, and, in your
grandfather’s name, state her dowry at fifty thousand per annum.’

‘Oh, you forget!’ I interjected.

‘No, Richie, I do not forget that you are off a leeshore; you are
mounted on a skittish racehorse, with, if you like, a New Forest fly
operating within an inch of his belly-girths. Our situation is so far
ticklish, and prompts invention and audacity.’

‘You must forget, sir, that in the present state of the squire’s mind, I
should be simply lying in writing to the prince that he offers a dowry.’

‘No, for your grandfather has yielded consent.’

‘By implication, you know he withdraws it.’

‘But if I satisfy him that you have not been extravagant?’

‘I must wait till he is satisfied.’

‘The thing is done, Richie, done. I see it in advance--it is done!
Whatever befalls me, you, my dear boy, in the space of two months, may
grasp--your fortune. Besides, here is my hand. I swear by it, my son,
that I shall satisfy the squire. I go farther; I say I shall have the
means to refund to you--the means, the money. The marriage is announced
in our prints for the Summer--say early June. And I undertake that
you, the husband of the princess, shall be the first gentleman in
England--that is, Europe. Oh! not ruling a coterie: not dazzling the
world with entertainments.’ He thought himself in earnest when he said,
‘I attach no mighty importance to these things, though there is no
harm I can perceive in leading the fashion--none that I see in having a
consummate style. I know your taste, and hers, Richie, the noble lady’s.
She shall govern the intellectual world--your poets, your painters,
your men of science. They reflect a beautiful sovereign mistress more
exquisitely than almost aristocracy does. But you head our aristocracy
also. You are a centre of the political world. So I scheme it. Between
you, I defy the Court to rival you. This I call distinction. It is no
mean aim, by heaven! I protest, it is an aim with the mark in sight, and
not out of range.’

He whipped himself up to one of his oratorical frenzies, of which a
cheque was the common fruit. The power of his persuasiveness in speech,
backed by the spectacle of his social accomplishments, continued to
subdue me, and I protested only inwardly even when I knew that he was
gambling with fortune. I wrote out many cheques, and still it appeared
to me that they were barely sufficient to meet the current expenses of
his household. Temple and I calculated that his Grand Parade would try
the income of a duke, and could but be a matter of months. Mention of it
reached Riversley from various quarters, from Lady Maria Higginson, from
Captain Bulsted and his wife, and from Sir Roderick Ilchester, who said
to me, with fine accentuation, ‘I have met your father.’ Sir Roderick,
an Englishman reputed of good breeding, informed the son that he had
actually met the father in lofty society, at Viscountess Sedley’s, at
Lady Dolchester’s, at Bramham DeWitt’s, and heard of him as a frequenter
of the Prussian and Austrian Embassy entertainments; and also that he
was admitted to the exclusive dinner-parties of the Countess de Strode,
‘which are,’ he observed, in the moderated tone of an astonishment
devoting itself to propagation, ‘the cream of society.’ Indubitably,
then, my father was an impostor: more Society proved it. The squire
listened like one pelted by a storm, sure of his day to come at the
close of the two months. I gained his commendation by shunning the
metropolitan Balls, nor did my father press me to appear at them. It was
tacitly understood between us that I should now and then support him
at his dinner-table, and pass bowing among the most select of his great
ladies. And this I did, and I felt at home with them, though I had to
bear with roughnesses from one or two of the more venerable dames, which
were not quite proper to good breeding. Old Lady Kane, great-aunt of
the Marquis of Edbury, was particularly my tormentor, through her
plain-spoken comments on my father’s legal suit; for I had to listen to
her without wincing, and agree in her general contempt of the Georges,
and foil her queries coolly, when I should have liked to perform Jorian
DeWitt’s expressed wish to ‘squeeze the acid out of her in one grip,
and toss her to the Gods that collect exhausted lemons.’ She took
extraordinary liberties with me.

‘Why not marry an Englishwoman? Rich young men ought to choose wives
from their own people, out of their own sets. Foreign women never get on
well in this country, unless they join the hounds to hunt the husband.’

She cited naturalized ladies famous for the pastime. Her world and its
outskirts she knew thoroughly, even to the fact of my grandfather’s
desire that I should marry Janet Ilchester. She named a duke’s daughter,
an earl’s. Of course I should have to stop the scandal: otherwise the
choice I had was unrestricted. My father she evidently disliked, but
she just as much disliked an encounter with his invincible bonhomie and
dexterous tongue. She hinted at family reasons for being shy of him,
assuring me that I was not implicated in them.

‘The Guelph pattern was never much to my taste,’ she said, and it
consoled me with the thought that he was not ranked as an adventurer in
the houses he entered. I learned that he was supposed to depend
chiefly on my vast resources. Edbury acted the part of informant to the
inquisitive harridan: ‘Her poor dear good-for-nothing Edbury! whose only
cure would be a nice, well-conducted girl, an heiress.’ She had cast her
eye on Anna Penrhys, but considered her antecedents doubtful. Spotless
innocence was the sole receipt for Edbury’s malady. My father, in a
fit of bold irony, proposed Lady Kane for President of his Tattle and
Scandal Club,--a club of ladies dotted with select gentlemen, the idea
of which Jorian DeWitt claimed the merit of starting, and my father
surrendered it to him, with the reservation, that Jorian intended an
association of backbiters pledged to reveal all they knew, whereas the
Club, in its present form, was an engine of morality and decency, and a
social safeguard, as well as an amusement. It comprised a Committee of
Investigation, and a Court of Appeal; its object was to arraign slander.
Lady Kane declined the honour. ‘I am not a washerwoman,’ she said to me,
and spoke of where dirty linen should be washed, and was distressingly
broad in her innuendoes concerning Edbury’s stepmother. This Club
sat and became a terror for a month, adding something to my father’s
reputation. His inexhaustible conversational art and humour gave it such
vitality as it had. Ladies of any age might apply for admission when
well seconded: gentlemen under forty-five years were rigidly excluded,
and the seniors must also have passed through the marriage ceremony.

Outside tattle and scandal declared, that the Club was originated to
serve as a club for Lady Edbury, but I chose to have no opinion upon
what I knew nothing of.

These matters were all ephemeral, and freaks; they produced, however,
somewhat of the same effect on me as on my father, in persuading me that
he was born for the sphere he occupied, and rendering me rather callous
as to the sources of ways and means. I put my name to a bond for several
thousand pounds, in conjunction with Lord Edbury, thinking my father
right in wishing to keep my cheque-book unworried, lest the squire
should be seized with a spasm of curiosity before the two months were
over. ‘I promise you I surprise him,’ my father said repeatedly. He did
not say how: I had the suspicion that he did not know. His confidence
and my growing recklessness acted in unison.

Happily the newspapers were quiet. I hoped consequently to find peace
at Riversley; but there the rumours of the Grand Parade were fabulous,
thanks to Captain Bulsted and Julia, among others. These two again
provoked an outbreak of rage from the squire, and I, after hearing them,
was almost disposed to side with him; they suggested an inexplicable
magnificence, and created an image of a man portentously endowed with
the capacity to throw dust in the eyes. No description of the Balls
could have furnished me with such an insight of their brilliancy as the
consuming ardour they awakened in the captain and his wife. He reviewed
them: ‘Princely entertainments! Arabian Nights!’

She built them up piecemeal: ‘The company! the dresses! the band! the
supper!’ The host was a personage supernatural. ‘Aladdin’s magician,
if you like,’ said Julia, ‘only-good! A perfect gentleman! and I’ll say
again, confound his enemies.’ She presumed, as she was aware she might
do, upon the squire’s prepossession in her favour, without reckoning
that I was always the victim.

‘Heard o’ that new story ‘bout a Dauphin?’ he asked.

‘A Dauphin?’ quoth Captain Bulsted. ‘I don’t know the fish.’

‘You’ve been in a pretty kettle of ‘em lately, William. I heard of it
yesterday on the Bench. Lord Shale, our new Lord-Lieutenant, brought it
down. A trick they played the fellow ‘bout a Dauphin. Serve him right.
You heard anything ‘bout it, Harry?’

I had not.

‘But I tell ye there is a Dauphin mixed up with him. A Dauphin and Mr.
Ik Dine!’

‘Mr. Ik Dine!’ exclaimed the captain, perplexed.

‘Ay, that’s German lingo, William, and you ought to know it if you’re a
loyal sailor--means “I serve.”’

‘Mr. Beltham,’ said the captain, seriously, ‘I give you my word of
honour as a man and a British officer, I don’t understand one syllable
of what you’re saying; but if it means any insinuation against the
gentleman who condescends to extend his hospitalities to my wife and me,
I must, with regret, quit the place where I have had the misfortune to
hear it.’

‘You stop where you are, William,’ the squire motioned to him. ‘Gad, I
shall have to padlock my mouth, or I shan’t have a friend left soon...
confounded fellow... I tell you they call him Mr. Ik Dine in town. Ik
Dine and a Dauphin! They made a regular clown and pantaloon o’ the pair,
I’m told. Couple o’ pretenders to Thrones invited to dine together and
talk over their chances and show their private marks. Oho! by-and-by,
William! You and I! Never a man made such a fool of in his life!’

The ladies retired. The squire continued, in a furious whisper:

‘They got the two together, William. Who are you? I’m a Dauphin; who
are you? I’m Ik Dine, bar sinister. Oh! says the other, then I take
precedence of you! Devil a bit, says the other; I’ve got more spots than
you. Proof, says one. You first, t’ other. Count, one cries. T’ other
sings out, Measles. Better than a dying Dauphin, roars t’ other; and
swore both of ‘m ‘twas nothing but Port-wine stains and pimples. Ha! ha!
And, William, will you believe it?--the couple went round begging the
company to count spots--ha! ha! to prove their big birth! Oh, Lord,
I’d ha’ paid a penny to be there! A Jack o’ Bedlam Ik Dine damned
idiot!--makes name o’ Richmond stink.’ (Captain Bulsted shot a wild
stare round the room to make sure that the ladies had gone.) ‘I tell ye,
William, I had it from Lord Shale himself only yesterday on the Bench.
He brought it to us hot from town--didn’t know I knew the fellow; says
the fellow’s charging and firing himself off all day and all night
too-can’t make him out. Says London’s mad about him: lots o’ women, the
fools! Ha, ha! a Dauphin!’

‘Ah, well, sir,’ Captain Bulsted supplicated feverishly, rubbing his
brows and whiskers.

‘It ‘s true, William. Fellow ought to be taken up and committed as a
common vagabond, and would be anywhere but in London. I’d jail him ‘fore
you cocked your eye twice. Fellow came here and talked me over to grant
him a couple o’ months to prove he hasn’t swindled his son of every
scrap of his money. We shall soon see. Not many weeks to run! And
pretends--fellow swears to me--can get him into Parliament; swears he’ll
get him in ‘fore the two months are over! An infernal--’

‘Please to recollect, sir; the old hereditary shall excuse you----’

‘Gout, you mean, William? By----’

‘You are speaking in the presence of his son, sir, and you are trying
the young gentleman’s affection for you hard.’

‘Eh? ‘Cause I’m his friend? Harry,’ my grandfather faced round on me,
‘don’t you know I ‘m the friend you can trust? Hal, did I ever borrow a
farthing of you? Didn’t I, the day of your majority, hand you the whole
of your inheritance from your poor broken-hearted mother, with interest,
and treat you like a man? And never played spy, never made an inquiry,
till I heard the scamp had been fastening on you like a blood-sucker,
and singing hymns into the ears of that squeamish dolt of a pipe-smoking
parson, Peterborough--never thought of doing it! Am I the man that
dragged your grandmother’s name through the streets and soiled yours?’

I remarked that I was sensible of the debt of gratitude I owed to him,
but would rather submit to the scourge, or to destitution, than listen
to these attacks on my father.

‘Cut yourself loose, Harry,’ he cried, a trifle mollified. ‘Don’t season
his stew--d’ ye hear? Stick to decent people. Why, you don’t expect
he’ll be locked up in the Tower for a finish, eh? It’ll be Newgate,
or the Bench. He and his Dauphin--ha! ha! A rascal crow and a Jack
Dauphin!’

Captain Bulsted reached me his hand. ‘You have a great deal to bear,
Harry. I commend you, my boy, for taking it manfully.’

‘I say no more,’ quoth the squire. ‘But what I said was true. The fellow
gives his little dinners and suppers to his marchionesses, countesses,
duchesses, and plays clown and pantaloon among the men. He thinks
a parcel o’ broidered petticoats ‘ll float him. So they may till a
tradesman sent stark mad pops a pin into him. Harry, I’d as lief hang on
to a fire-ship. Here’s Ilchester tells me... and Ilchester speaks of him
under his breath now as if he were sitting in a pew funking the parson.
Confound the fellow! I say he’s guilty of treason. Pooh! who cares! He
cuts out the dandies of his day, does he? He’s past sixty, if he’s a
month. It’s all damned harlequinade. Let him twirl off one columbine or
another, or a dozen, and then--the last of him! Fellow makes the world
look like a farce. He ‘s got about eight feet by five to caper on, and
all London gaping at him--geese! Are you a gentleman and a man of sense,
Harry Richmond, to let yourself be lugged about in public--by the Lord!
like a pair of street-tumblers in spangled haunch-bags, father and boy,
on a patch of carpet, and a drum banging, and tossed and turned inside
out, and my God! the ass of a fellow strutting the ring with you on his
shoulder! That’s the spectacle. And you, Harry, now I ‘ll ask you, do
you mean your wife--egad, it’d be a pretty scene, with your princess in
hip-up petticoats, stiff as bottle-funnel top down’ards, airing a whole
leg, and knuckling a tambourine!’

‘Not crying, my dear lad?’ Captain Bulsted put his arm round me kindly,
and tried to catch a glimpse of my face. I let him see I was not going
through that process. ‘Whew!’ said he, ‘and enough to make any Christian
sweat! You’re in a bath, Harry. I wouldn’t expect the man who murdered
his godmother for one shilling and fivepence three-farthings the other
day, to take such a slinging, and think he deserved it.’

My power of endurance had reached its limit.

‘You tell me, sir, you had this brutal story from the Lord-Lieutenant of
the county?’

‘Ay, from Lord Shale. But I won’t have you going to him and betraying
our connection with a--’

‘Halloo!’ Captain Bulsted sang out to his wife on the lawn. ‘And now,
squire, I have had my dose. And you will permit me to observe, that I
find it emphatically what we used to call at school black-jack.’

‘And you were all the better for it afterwards, William.’

‘We did not arrive at that opinion, sir. Harry, your arm. An hour with
the ladies will do us both good. The squire,’ he murmured, wiping
his forehead as he went out, ‘has a knack of bringing us into close
proximity with hell-fire when he pleases.’

Julia screamed on beholding us, ‘Aren’t you two men as pale as death!’

Janet came and looked. ‘Merely a dose,’ said the captain. ‘We are
anxious to play battledore and shuttlecock madly.’

‘So he shall, the dear!’ Julia caressed him. ‘We’ll all have a
tournament in the wet-weather shed.’

Janet whispered to me, ‘Was it--the Returning Thanks?’

‘The what?’ said I, with the dread at my heart of something worse than I
had heard.

She hailed Julia to run and fetch the battledores, and then told me she
had been obliged to confiscate the newspapers that morning and cast
the burden on post-office negligence. ‘They reach grandada’s hands by
afternoon post, Harry, and he finds objectionable passages blotted or
cut out; and as long as the scissors don’t touch the business columns
and the debates, he never asks me what I have been doing. He thinks I
keep a scrap-book. I haven’t often time in the morning to run an eye all
over the paper. This morning it was the first thing I saw.’

What had she seen? She led me out of view of the windows and showed me.

My father was accused of having stood up at a public dinner and returned
thanks on behalf of an Estate of the Realm: it read monstrously. I
ceased to think of the suffering inflicted on me by my grandfather.

Janet and I, side by side with the captain and Julia, carried on the
game of battledore and shuttlecock, in a match to see whether the
unmarried could keep the shuttle flying as long as the married, with
varying fortunes. She gazed on me, to give me the comfort of her
sympathy, too much, and I was too intent on the vision of my father
either persecuted by lies or guilty of hideous follies, to allow the
match to be a fair one. So Julia could inform the squire that she
and William had given the unmarried pair a handsome beating, when he
appeared peeping round one of the shed-pillars.

‘Of course you beat ‘em,’ said the squire. ‘It ‘s not my girl’s fault.’
He said more, to the old tune, which drove Janet away.

I remembered, when back in the London vortex, the curious soft beauty
she won from casting up her eyes to watch the descending feathers, and
the brilliant direct beam of those thick-browed, firm, clear eyes, with
her frown, and her set lips and brave figure, when she was in the act
of striking to keep up a regular quick fusilade. I had need of calm
memories. The town was astir, and humming with one name.



CHAPTER XLII. THE MARQUIS OF EDBURY AND HIS PUPPET

I passed from man to man, hearing hints and hesitations, alarming
half-remarks, presumed to be addressed to one who could supply the
remainder, and deduce consequences. There was a clearer atmosphere in
the street of Clubs. Jennings was the first of my father’s more intimate
acquaintances to meet me frankly. He spoke, though not with great
seriousness, of the rumour of a possible prosecution. Sir Weeton Slater
tripped up to us with a mixed air of solicitude and restraint, asked
whether I was well, and whether I had seen the newspapers that morning;
and on my informing him that I had just come up from Riversley, on
account of certain rumours, advised me to remain in town strictly
for the present. He also hinted at rumours of prosecutions. ‘The fact
is----’ he began several times, rendered discreet, I suppose, by my
juvenility, fierte, and reputed wealth.

We were joined by Admiral Loftus and Lord Alton. They queried and
counterqueried as to passages between my father and the newspapers,
my father and the committee of his Club, preserving sufficient
consideration for me to avoid the serious matter in all but distant
allusions; a point upon which the breeding of Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn
was not so accurate a guide to him. An exciting public scandal soon
gathers knots of gossips in Clubland. We saw Wedderburn break from a
group some way down the pavement and pick up a fresh crumb of amusement
at one of the doorsteps. ‘Roy Richmond is having his benefit to-day!’ he
said, and repeated this and that, half audible to me. For the rest,
he pooh-poohed the idea of the Law intervening. His ‘How d’ ye do, Mr.
Richmond, how d’ ye do?’ was almost congratulatory. ‘I think we meet at
your father’s table to-night? It won’t be in the Tower, take my word for
it. Oh! the papers! There’s no Act to compel a man to deny what appears
in the papers. No such luck as the Tower!--though Littlepitt (Mr.
Wedderburn’s nickname for our Premier) would be fool enough for that. He
would. If he could turn attention from his Bill, he’d do it. We should
have to dine off Boleyn’s block:--coquite horum obsonia he’d say, eh?’

Jennings espied my father’s carriage, and stepped to speak a word to
the footman. He returned, saying, with a puff of his cheeks: ‘The Grand
Monarque has been sending his state equipage to give the old backbiting
cripple Brisby an airing. He is for horse exercise to-day they’ve
dropped him in Courtenay Square. There goes Brisby. He’d take the good
Samaritan’s shilling to buy a flask of poison for him. He ‘ll use Roy’s
carriage to fetch and carry for that venomous old woman Kane, I’ll
swear.’

‘She’s a male in Scripture,’ said Wedderburn, and this reminded me of an
anecdote that reminded him of another, and after telling them, he handed
round his hat for the laugh, as my father would have phrased it.

‘Has her ladyship declared war?’ Sir Weeton Slater inquired.

‘No, that’s not her preliminary to wageing it,’ Wedderburn replied.
These high-pressure smart talkers had a moment of dulness, and he
bethought him that he must run into the Club for letters, and was busy
at Westminster, where, if anything fresh occurred between meridian
and six o’clock, he should be glad, he said, to have word of it by
messenger, that he might not be behind his Age.

The form of humour to express the speed of the world was common, but it
struck me as a terrible illustration of my father’s. I had still a sense
of pleasure in the thought that these intimates of his were gentlemen
who relished and, perhaps, really liked him. They were not parasites;
not the kind of men found hanging about vulgar profligates.

I quitted them. Sir Weeton Slater walked half-a-dozen steps beside
me. ‘May I presume on a friendly acquaintance with your father, Mr.
Richmond?’ he said. ‘The fact is--you will not be offended?--he is
apt to lose his head, unless the Committee of Supply limits him very
precisely. I am aware that there is no material necessity for any
restriction.’ He nodded to me as to one of the marvellously endowed,
as who should say, the Gods presided at your birth. The worthy baronet
struggled to impart his meaning, which was, that he would have me define
something like an allowance to my father, not so much for the purpose of
curtailing his expenditure--he did not venture upon private ground--as
to bridle my father’s ideas of things possible for a private gentleman
in this country. In that character none were like him. As to his suit,
or appeal, he could assure me that Serjeant Wedderburn, and all who
would or could speak on the subject, saw no prospect of success; not
any. The worst of it was, that it caused my father to commit himself
in sundry ways. It gave a handle to his enemies. It--he glanced at me
indicatively.

I thanked the well-meaning gentleman without encouraging him to
continue.

‘It led him to perform once more as a Statue of Bronze before the whole
of gaping London!’ I could have added. That scene on the pine-promontory
arose in my vision, followed by other scenes of the happy German days. I
had no power to conjure up the princess.

Jorian DeWitt was the man I wanted to see. After applications at his
Club and lodgings I found him dragging his Burgundy leg in the Park,
on his road to pay a morning visit to his fair French enchantress. I
impeached him, and he pleaded guilty, clearly not wishing to take me
with him, nor would he give me Mlle. Jenny’s address, which I had. By
virtue of the threat that I would accompany him if he did not satisfy
me, I managed to extract the story of the Dauphin, aghast at the
discovery of its being true. The fatal after-dinner speech he believed
to have been actually spoken, and he touched on that first. ‘A trap
was laid for him, Harry Richmond; and a deuced clever trap it was. They
smuggled in special reporters. There wasn’t a bit of necessity for the
toast. But the old vixen has shown her hand, so now he must fight. He
can beat her single-handed on settees. He’ll find her a tartar at long
bowls: she sticks at nothing. She blazes out, that he scandalizes her
family. She has a dozen indictments against him. You must stop in town
and keep watch. There’s fire in my leg to explode a powder-magazine a
mile off!’

‘Is it the Margravine of Rippau?’ I inquired. I could think of no other
waspish old woman.

‘Lady Dane,’ said Jorian. ‘She set Edbury on to face him with the
Dauphin. You don’t fancy it came of the young dog “all of himself,” do
you? Why, it was clever! He trots about a briefless little barrister,
a scribbler, devilish clever and impudent, who does his farces for him.
Tenby ‘s the fellow’s name, and it’s the only thing I haven’t heard him
pun on. Puns are the smallpox of the language;--we’re cursed with an
epidemic. By gad, the next time I meet him I ‘ll roar out for vaccine
matter.’

He described the dinner given by Edbury at a celebrated City tavern
where my father and this so-called Dauphin were brought together.
‘Dinner to-night,’ he nodded, as he limped away on his blissful visit
of ceremony to sprightly Chassediane (a bouquet had gone in advance):
he left me stupefied. The sense of ridicule enveloped me in suffocating
folds, howling sentences of the squire’s Boeotian burlesque by fits.
I felt that I could not but take the world’s part against the man who
allowed himself to be made preposterous externally, when I knew him to
be staking his frail chances and my fortune with such rashness. It was
unpardonable for one in his position to incur ridicule. Nothing but
a sense of duty kept me from rushing out of London, and I might have
indulged the impulse advantageously. Delay threw me into the clutches of
Lady Kane herself, on whom I looked with as composed a visage as I could
command, while she leaned out of her carriage chattering at me, and
sometimes over my head to passing gentlemen.

She wanted me to take a seat beside her, she had so much to say. Was
there not some funny story abroad of a Pretender to the Throne of
France? she asked, wrinkling her crow’sfeet eyelids to peer at me, and
wished to have the particulars. I had none to offer. ‘Ah! well,’ said
she; ‘you stay in London? Come and see me. I’m sure you ‘re sensible.
You and I can put our heads together. He’s too often in Courtenay
Square, and he’s ten years too young for that, still. He ought to have
good advice. Tell me, how can a woman who can’t guide herself help a
man?--and the most difficult man alive! I’m sure you understand me. I
can’t drive out in the afternoon for them. They make a crush here, and
a clatter of tongues! ... That’s my private grievance. But he’s now
keeping persons away who have the first social claim... I know they
can’t appear. Don’t look confused; no one accuses you. Only I do say it
‘s getting terribly hot in London for somebody. Call on me. Will you?’

She named her hours. I bowed as soon as I perceived my opportunity.
Her allusions were to Lady Edbury, and to imputed usurpations of my
father’s. I walked down to the Chambers where Temple was reading Law,
for a refuge from these annoyances. I was in love with the modest
shadowed life Temple lived, diligently reading, and glancing on the
world as through a dusky window, happy to let it run its course while
he sharpened his weapons. A look at Temple’s face told me he had heard
quite as much as was known in the West. Dining-halls of lawyers are not
Cistercian; he was able to give me three distinct versions of the story
of the Dauphin. No one could be friendlier. Indeed Temple now urged me
forcibly to prevent my father from spending money and wearing his heart
out in vain, by stopping the case in Dettermain and Newson’s hands.
They were respectable lawyers, he said, in a lawyer’s ordinary tone
when including such of his species as are not black sheep. He thought it
possible that my father’s personal influence overbore their judgment. In
fact, nothing bound them to refuse to work for him, and he believed that
they had submitted their views for his consideration.

‘I do wish he’d throw it up,’ Temple exclaimed. ‘It makes him enemies.
And just examining it, you see he could get no earthly good out of it:
he might as well try to scale a perpendicular rock. But when I’m with
him, I’m ready to fancy what he pleases--I acknowledge that. He has
excess of phosphorus, or he’s ultra-electrical; doctors could tell us
better than lawyers.’ Temple spoke of the clever young barrister Tenby
as the man whom his father had heard laughing over the trick played upon
‘Roy Richmond.’ I conceived that I might furnish Mr. Tenby a livelier
kind of amusement, and the thought that I had once been sur le terrain,
and had bitterly regretted it, by no means deterred me from the idea
of a second expedition, so black was my mood. A review of the
circumstances, aided by what reached my ears before the night went over,
convinced me that Edbury was my man. His subordinate helped him to
the instrument, and possibly to the plot, but Edbury was the capital
offender.

The scene of the prank was not in itself so bad as the stuff which a
cunning anecdotist could make out of it. Edbury invited my father to a
dinner at a celebrated City tavern. He kept his guests (Jennings, Jorian
DeWitt, Alton, Wedderburn, were among the few I was acquainted with who
were present) awaiting the arrival of a person for whom he professed
extraordinary respect. The Dauphin of France was announced. A mild,
flabby, amiable-looking old person, with shelving forehead and grey
locks--excellently built for the object, Jorian said--entered. The Capet
head and embonpoint were there. As far as a personal resemblance
might go, his pretensions to be the long-lost Dauphin were grotesquely
convincing, for, notwithstanding the accurate picture of the Family
presented by him, the man was a pattern bourgeois:--a sturdy impostor,
one would have thought, and I thought so when I heard of him; but I have
been assured that he had actually grown old in the delusion that he,
carrying on his business in the City of London, was the identical
Dauphin.

Edbury played his part by leading his poor old victim half way to meet
his other most honoured guest, hesitating then and craving counsel
whether he was right in etiquette to advance the Dauphin so far. The
Dauphin left him mildly to decide the point: he was eminently mild
throughout, and seems to have thought himself in good faith surrounded
by believers and adherents. Edbury’s task soon grew too delicate for
that coarse boy. In my father’s dexterous hands he at once lost his
assumption of the gallantry of manner which could alone help him to
retain his advantage. When the wine was in him he began to bawl. I could
imagine the sort of dialogue he raised. Bets on the Dauphin, bets
on Roy: they were matched as on a racecourse. The Dauphin remembered
incidents of his residence in the Temple, with a beautiful juvenile
faintness: a conscientious angling for recollection, Wedderburn said.
Roy was requested to remember something, to drink and refresh his memory
infantine incidents were suggested. He fenced the treacherous host
during dinner with superb complacency.

The Dauphin was of an immoveable composure. He ‘stated simple facts: he
was the Dauphin of France, providentially rescued from the Temple in the
days of the Terror.’ For this deliverance, somewhat to the consternation
of the others, he offered up a short prayer of thanksgiving over his
plate. He had, he said, encountered incredulity. He had his proofs.
He who had never been on the soil of France since early boyhood, spoke
French with a pure accent: he had the physical and moral constitution
of the Family: owing to events attending his infant days, he was timid.
Jorian imitated him:--‘I start at the opening of a door; I see dark
faces in my sleep: it is a dungeon; I am at the knees of my Unfortunate
Royal Father, with my Beautiful Mother.’ His French was quaint, but not
absurd. He became loquacious, apostrophizing vacancy with uplifted hand
and eye. The unwonted invitation to the society of noblemen made him
conceive his Dauphinship to be on the high road to a recognition in
England, and he was persuaded to drink and exhibit proofs: which were
that he had the constitution of the Family, as aforesaid, in every
particular; that he was peculiarly marked with testificatory spots;
and that his mere aspect inspired all members and branch members of the
Family with awe and stupefaction. One of the latter hearing of him, had
appointed to meet him in a pastrycook’s shop. He met him, and left the
place with a cloud on his brow, showing tokens of respectful sympathy.

Conceive a monomaniacal obese old English citizen, given to lift hand
and eye and address the cornices, claiming to be an Illustrious Boy,
and calling on a beautiful historic mother and unfortunate Royal sire to
attest it! No wonder the table was shaken with laughter. He appealed to
Tenby constantly, as to the one man he knew in the room. Tenby it was
who made the discovery of him somewhere in the City, where he earned
his livelihood either as a corn-merchant; or a stockbroker, or a
chronometer-maker, or a drysalter, and was always willing to gratify a
customer with the sight of his proofs of identity. Mr. Tenby made it his
business to push his clamorous waggishness for the exhibition. I could
readily believe that my father was more than his match in disposable
sallies and weight of humour, and that he shielded the old creature
successfully, so long as he had a tractable being to protect. But the
Dauphin was plied with wine, and the marquis had his fun. Proof upon
proof in verification of his claims was proffered by the now-tremulous
son of St. Louis--so he called himself. With, Jorian admitted, a
real courtly dignity, he stood up and proposed to lead the way to any
neighbouring cabinet to show the spots on his person; living witnesses
to the truth of his allegations, he declared them to be. The squire had
authority for his broad farce, except in so far as he mixed up my father
in the swinery of it.

I grew more and more convinced that my father never could have lost his
presence of mind when he found himself in the net of a plot to cover him
with ridicule. He was the only one who did not retire to the Dauphin’s
‘chamber of testification,’ to return convulsed with vinous laughter
after gravely inspecting the evidence; for which abstention the Dauphin
reproached him violently, in round terms of abuse, challengeing him to
go through a similar process. This was the signal for Edbury, Tenby, and
some of the rest. They formed a circle, one-half for the Dauphin, one
for Roy. How long the boorish fun lasted, and what exactly came of it,
I did not hear. Jorian DeWitt said my father lost his temper, a point
contested by Wedderburn and Jennings, for it was unknown of him. Anyhow,
he thundered to some effect, inasmuch as he detached those that had
gentlemanly feelings from the wanton roysterers, and next day the latter
pleaded wine. But they told the story, not without embellishments. The
world followed their example.

I dined and slept at Temple’s house, not caring to meet my incarnate
humiliation. I sent to hear that he was safe. A quiet evening with a
scholarly man, and a man of strong practical ability and shrewdness,
like Mr. Temple, did me good. I wished my father and I were on the same
footing as he and his son, and I may add his daughters. They all talked
sensibly; they were at feud with nobody; they reflected their condition.
It was a simple orderly English household, of which the father was the
pillar, the girls the ornaments, the son the hope, growing to take
his father’s place. My envy of such a home was acute, and I thought of
Janet, and how well she was fashioned to build one resembling it, if
only the mate allotted to her should not be a fantastical dreamer.
Temple’s character seemed to me to demand a wife like Janet on its
merits; an idea that depressed me exceedingly. I had introduced Temple
to Anna Penrhys, who was very kind to him; but these two were not
framed to be other than friends. Janet, on the contrary, might some day
perceive the sterling fellow Temple was, notwithstanding his moderate
height. She might, I thought. I remembered that I had once wished that
she would, and I was amazed at myself. But why? She was a girl sure to
marry. I brushed these meditations away. They recurred all the time I
was in Temple’s house.

Mr. Temple waited for my invitation to touch on my father’s Case, when
he distinctly pronounced his opinion that it could end but in failure.
Though a strict Constitutionalist, he had words of disgust for princes,
acknowledging, however, that we were not practical in our use of them,
and kept them for political purposes often to the perversion of our
social laws and their natural dispositions. He spoke of his son’s freak
in joining the Navy. ‘That was the princess’s doing,’ said Temple. ‘She
talked of our naval heroes, till she made me feel I had only to wear the
anchor buttons to be one myself. Don’t tell her I was invalided from the
service, Richie, for the truth is, I believe, I half-shammed. And the
time won’t be lost. You’ll see I shall extract guineas from “old ocean”
 like salt. Precious few barristers understand maritime cases. The other
day I was in Court, and prompted a great Q.C. in a case of collision.
Didn’t I, sir?’

‘I think there was a hoarse whisper audible up to the Judge’s seat at
intervals,’ said Mr. Temple.

‘The Bar cannot confess to obligations from those who don’t wear the
robe,’ Temple rejoined.

His father advised me to read for the Bar, as a piece of very good
training.

I appealed to Temple, whether he thought it possible to read law-books
in a cockboat in a gale of wind.

Temple grimaced and his father nodded. Still it struck me that I might
one day have the felicity of quiet hours to sit down with Temple and
read Law--far behind him in the race. And he envied me, in his friendly
manner, I knew. My ambition had been blown to tatters.

A new day dawned. The household rose and met at the breakfast-table,
devoid of any dread of the morning newspapers. Their talk was like
the chirrup of birds. Temple and his father walked away together to
chambers, bent upon actual business--upon doing something! I reflected
emphatically, and compared them to ships with rudders, while I was at
the mercy of wind, tide, and wave. I called at Dettermain and Newson’s,
and heard there of a discovery of a witness essential to the case,
either in North Wales or in New South. I did not, as I had intended, put
a veto on their proceedings. The thing to do was to see my father, and
cut the case at the fountain head. For this purpose, it was imperative
that I should go to him, and prepare myself for the interview by looking
at the newspapers first. I bought one, hastily running my eyes down the
columns in the shop. His name was printed, but merely in a fashionable
notification that carriages took up and set down for his costume Ball,
according to certain regulations. The relief of comparative obscurity
helped me to breathe freely: not to be laughed at, was a gain. I was
rather inclined to laud his courage in entering assembly-rooms, where
he must be aware that he would see the Dauphin on every face. Perhaps he
was guilty of some new extravagance last night, too late for scandal to
reinforce the reporters!

Mrs. Waddy had a woeful visage when informing me that he was out, gone
to Courtenay Square. She ventured a murmur of bills coming in. Like
everybody else, she fancied he drew his supplies from my inexhaustible
purse; she hoped the bills would be paid off immediately: the servants’
wages were overdue. ‘Never can I get him to attend to small accounts,’
she whimpered, and was so ready to cry outright, that I said, ‘Tusk,’
and with the one word gave her comfort. ‘Of course, you, Mr. Harry,
can settle them, I know that.’ We were drawing near to poor old Sewis’s
legacy, even for the settling of the small accounts!

London is a narrow place to one not caring to be seen. I could not
remain in this creditor-riddled house; I shunned the Parks, the Clubs,
and the broad, brighter streets of the West. Musing on the refreshing
change it would be to me to find myself suddenly on board Captain Jasper
Welsh’s barque Priscilla, borne away to strange climes and tongues,
the world before me, I put on the striding pace which does not invite
interruption, and no one but Edbury would have taken the liberty.
I heard his shout. ‘Halloa! Richmond.’ He was driving his friend
Witlington in his cabriolet. ‘Richmond, my hearty, where the deuce have
you been? I wanted you to dine with me the other night.’

I replied, looking at him steadily, that I wished I had been there.

‘Compendious larks!’ cried he, in the slang of his dog’s day. ‘I say;
you’re one at Duke Fitz’s masquerade to-night? Tell us your toggery.
Hang it, you might go for the Black Prince. I’m Prince Hal. Got
a headache? Come to my Club and try my mixture. Yoicks! it’d make
Methuselah and Melchisedec jump up and have a twirl and a fandango.
I say, you’re thick with that little French actress Chastedian jolly
little woman! too much to say for herself to suit me.’

He described the style of woman that delighted him--an ideal English
shepherdess of the print-shops, it appeared, and of extremely remote
interest to me, I thought at the time. Eventually I appointed to walk
round to his Club, and he touched his horse gently, and bobbed his
diminutive henchman behind his smart cabriolet, the admiration of the
street.

I found him waiting for me on the steps of his Club, puffing a cigar
with all his vigour, in the classic attitude of a trumpeter. My first
words were: ‘I think I have to accuse you of insulting me.’

‘Insulting you, Richmond!’ he cried, much surprised, holding his cigar
in transit.

‘If you insult my father, I make you responsible to me.’

‘Insult old Duke Fitz! I give you my word of honour, Richmond--why, I
like him; I like the old boy. Wouldn’t hurt him for the world and all
Havannah.

What the deuce have you got into your head? Come in and smoke.’

The mention of his dinner and the Dauphin crazed him with laughter.
He begged me as a man to imagine the scene: the old Bloated Bourbon
of London Wall and Camberwell! an Illustrious Boy!--drank like a
fish!--ready to show himself to the waiters! And then with ‘Gee’ and
‘Gaw,’ the marquis spouted out reminiscences of scene, the best ever
witnessed! ‘Up starts the Dauphin. “Damn you, sir! and damn me, sir, if
believe you have a spot on your whole body!” And snuffles and puffs--you
should have been there Richmond, I wrote to ask you: did, upon my life!
wanted you there. Lord! why, you won’t get such fun in a century. And
old Roy! he behaved uncommonly finely: said capital things, by Jove!
Never saw him shine so; old trump! Says Dauphin, “My beautiful mother
had a longing for strawberries out of season. I am marked with a
strawberry, here.” Says Roy: “It is an admirable and roomy site, but as
I am not your enemy, sir, I doubt if I shall often have the opportunity
to behold it.” Ha! ha!--gee! Richmond, you’ve missed the deucedest good
scene ever acted.’

How could I, after having had an adversary like Prince Otto, call upon
a fellow such as Edbury to give me reason for his conduct? He rollicked
and laughed until my ungovernable impatience brought him to his senses.

‘Dash it, you’re a fire-eater, I know, Richmond. We can’t fight in this
country; ain’t allowed. And fighting ‘s infernal folly. By Jove! If
you’re going to tumble down every man who enjoys old Roy, you’ve your
work cut out for you. He’s long chalks the best joke out. ‘Twixt you and
me, he did return thanks. What does it matter what old Duke Fitz does?
I give him a lift on his ladder with all my heart. He keeps a capital
table. And I’ll be hanged if he hasn’t got the secret of the women. How
he does it old Roy! If the lords were ladies they’d vote him premier
peer, double quick. And I’ll tell you what, Richmond, I’m thought a
devil of a good-tempered fellow for not keeping watch over Courtenay
Square. I don’t call it my business to be house dog for a pretty
stepmother. But there’s talking and nodding, and oh! leave all that:
come in and smoke, and let me set you up; and I’ll shake your hand.
Halloa! I’m hailed.’

A lady, grasping the veil across her face, beckoned her hand from
a closed carriage below. Edbury ran down to her. I caught sight of
ravishing golden locks, reminding me of Mabel Sweetwinter’s hair, and
pricking me with a sensation of spite at the sex for their deplorable
madness in the choice of favourites. Edbury called me to come to the
carriage window. I moved slowly, but the carriage wheeled about and
rolled away. I could just see the outline of a head muffled in furs and
lace.

‘Queer fish, women!’ he delivered himself of the philosophical
ejaculation cloudily. I was not on terms with him to offer any remark
upon the one in question. His imperturbable good humour foiled me, and I
left him, merely giving him a warning, to which his answer was:

‘Oh! come in and have a bottle of claret.’

Claret or brandy had done its work on him by the time I encountered him
some hours later, in the Park. Bramham DeWitt, whom I met in the same
neighbourhood, offered me a mount after lunch, advising me to keep near
my father as much as I conveniently could; and he being sure to appear
in the Park, I went, and heard his name to the right and left of me.
He was now, as he said to me once that he should become, ‘the tongue of
London.’ I could hardly expect to escape from curious scrutiny myself;
I was looked at. Here and there I had to lift my hat and bow. The
stultification of one’s feelings and ideas in circumstances which divide
and set them at variance is worse than positive pain. The looks shed on
me were rather flattering, but I knew that in the background I was felt
to be the son of the notorious. Edbury came trotting up to us like a
shaken sack, calling, ‘Neigh! any of you seen old Roy?’ Bramham DeWitt,
a stiff, fashionable man of fifty, proud of his blood and quick as his
cousin Jorian to resent an impertinence, replied:

‘Are you the Marquis of Edbury, or a drunken groom, sir?’

‘Gad, old gentleman, I’ve half a mind to ride you down,’ said Edbury,
and, espying me, challenged me to a race to run down the fogies.

A cavalcade of six abreast came cantering along. I saw my father listen
to a word from Lady Edbury, and push his horse to intercept the marquis.
They spoke. ‘Presently, presently,’ my father said; ‘ride to the rear,
and keep at half a stone’s throw-say, a groom’s distance.’

‘Groom be hanged!’ Edbury retorted. ‘I made a bet I’d drive you out of
the Park, old Roy!’

‘Ride behind, then,’ said my father, and to my astonishment Edbury
obeyed him, with laughter. Lady Edbury smiled to herself; and I
experienced the esteem I perceived in her for a masterful manner. A few
minutes later my father beckoned me to pay my respects to Graf Kesensky,
an ambassador with strong English predilections and some influence
among us. He asked me if he was right in supposing I wished to enter
Parliament. I said he was, wondering at the interest a foreigner could
find in it. The count stopped a quiet-pacing gentleman. Bramhaxri DeWitt
joined them, and a group of friends. I was introduced to Mr. Beauchamp
Hill, the Government whip, who begged me to call on him with reference
to the candidature of a Sussex borough: ‘that is,’ said he, turning to
Graf Kesensky, ‘if you’re sure the place is open? I’ve heard nothing of
Falmouth’s accident.’ The count replied that Falmouth was his intimate
friend; he had received a special report that Falmouth was dying, just
as he was on the point of mounting his horse. ‘We shan’t have lost
time,’ said Mr. Hill. The Government wanted votes. I went down to the
House of Commons at midnight to see him. He had then heard of Falmouth’s
hopeless condition, and after extracting my political views, which were
for the nonce those of a happy subserviency, he expressed his belief
that the new writ for the borough of Chippenden might be out, and myself
seated on the Government benches, within a very short period. Nor would
it be necessary, he thought, for the Government nominee to spend money:
‘though that does not affect you, Mr. Richmond!’ My supposed wealth gave
me currency even in political circles.



CHAPTER XLIII. I BECOME ONE OF THE CHOSEN OF THE NATION

An entire revulsion in my feelings and my way of thinking was caused by
this sudden change of prospect. A member of our Parliament, I could then
write to Ottilia, and tell her that I had not wasted time. And it was
due to my father, I confessed, when he returned from his ball at dawn,
that I should thank him for speaking to Graf Kesensky. ‘Oh!’ said he,
‘that was our luck, Richie. I have been speaking about you to hundreds
for the last six months, and now we owe it to a foreigner!’ I thanked
him again. He looked eminently handsome in his Henry III. costume, and
was disposed to be as luxurious as his original. He had brought Count
Lika, Secretary of Legation to the Austrian Embassy, dressed as an
Albanian, with him. The two were stretched on couches, and discoursing
of my father’s reintroduction of the sedan chair to society. My father
explained that he had ordered a couple of dozen of these chairs to be
built on a pattern of his own. And he added, ‘By the way, Richie,
there will be sedaniers--porters to pay to-day. Poor men should be paid
immediately.’ I agreed with the monarch. Contemplating him, I became
insensible to the sting of ridicule which had been shooting through me,
agonizing me for the last eight-and-forty hours. Still I thought: can I
never escape from the fascination?--let me only get into Parliament! The
idea in me was that Parliament lifted me nearer to Ottilia, and would
prompt me to resolute action, out of his tangle of glittering cobwebs.
I told him of my interview with Beauchamp Hill. ‘I have never known
Kesensky wrong yet,’ said he; ‘except in his backing of Falmouth’s
horses.’ Count Lika murmured that he hoped his Chief would be wrong in
something else: he spoke significantly. My father raised his eyebrows.
‘In his opinion,’ Lika accepted the invitation to pursue, ‘Prince Ernest
will not let that announcement stand uncontradicted.’

My father’s eyes dwelt on him. ‘Are we accused of it?’

Lika slipped from the question. ‘Who is accused of a newspaper’s doings?
It is but the denial of a statement.’

‘I dare them to deny it!--and, Lika, my dear fellow, light me a
cigarette,’ said my father.

‘Then,’ said Lika, touching the flame delicately, ‘you take the view
that Kesensky is wrong in another thing besides horses.’

I believe he struck on the subject casually: there was nothing for him
to gain or lose in it; and he had a liking for my father.

After puffing the cigarette twice or thrice my father threw it down,
resuming his conversation upon the sedan, the appropriate dresses of
certain of the great masquerading ladies, and an incident that appeared
to charge Jorian DeWitt with having misconducted himself. The moment
Lika had gone upstairs for two or three hours’ sleep, he said to
me: ‘Richie, you and I have no time for that. We must have a man
at Falmouth’s house by eight o’clock. If the scrubbing-maid on all
fours-not an inelegant position, I have remarked--declares him dead,
we are at Bartlett’s (money-lender) by ten: and in Chippenden borough
before two post meridian. As I am a tactician, there is mischief! but I
will turn it to my uses, as I did our poor Jorian to-night; he smuggled
in the Chassediane: I led her out on my arm. Of that by and by. The
point is, that from your oath in Parliament you fly to Sarkeld. I
implore you now, by your love for me and the princess, not to lose
precious minutes. Richie, we will press things so that you shall be in
Sarkeld by the end of the month. My son! my dear boy! how you loved me
once!--you do still! then follow my directions. I have a head. Ay, you
think it wild? ‘Tis true, my mother was a poetess. But I will convince
my son as I am convincing the world-tut, tut! To avoid swelling talk,
I tell you, Richie, I have my hand on the world’s wheel, and now is the
time for you to spring from it and gain your altitude. If you fail, my
success is emptiness.’

‘Will you avoid Edbury and his like, and protect yourself?’ was my form
of stipulation, spoken to counteract his urgency.

He gave no answer beyond a wave of the hand suitable to his princely
one-coloured costume of ruffled lavender silk, and the magnificent
leg he turned to front me. My senses even up to that period were so
impressionable as to be swayed by a rich dress and a grand manner
when circumstances were not too unfavourable. Now they seemed very
favourable, for they offered me an upward path to tread. His appearance
propitiated me less after he had passed through the hands of his man
Tollingby, but I had again surrendered the lead to him. As to the risk
of proceedings being taken against him, he laughed scornfully at the
suggestion. ‘They dare not. The more I dare, the less dare they.’ Again
I listened to his curious roundabout reasoning, which dragged humour at
its heels like a comical cur, proclaiming itself imposingly, in spite
of the mongrel’s barking, to be prudence and common sense. Could I
deny that I owed him gratitude for the things I cherished most?--for
my acquaintance with Ottilia?--for his services in Germany?--for the
prospect of my elevation in England? I could not; and I tried hard to
be recklessly grateful. As to money, he reiterated that he could put
his hand on it to satisfy the squire on the day of accounts: for the
present, we must borrow. His argument upon borrowing--which I knew well,
and wondered that I did not at the outset disperse with a breath of
contempt--gained on me singularly when reviewed under the light of my
immediate interests: it ran thus:--We have a rich or a barren future,
just as we conceive it. The art of generalship in life consists in
gathering your scattered supplies to suit a momentous occasion; and it
is the future which is chiefly in debt to us, and adjures us for its
sake to fight the fight and conquer. That man is vile and fit to be
trampled on who cannot count his future in gold and victory. If, as we
find, we are always in debt to the past, we should determine that the
future is in our debt, and draw on it. Why let our future lie idle while
we need succour? For instance, to-morrow I am to have what saves my
reputation in the battle to-day; shall I not take it at once? The
military commander who acts on that principle overcomes his adversary to
a certainty.

‘You, Richie, the member for this borough of Chippenden, have won solid
ground. I guarantee it to you. And you go straight from the hustings,
or the first taste of parliamentary benches, to Sarkeld: you take your
grandad’s proposition to Prince Ernest: you bring back the prince’s
acceptance to the squire. Can you hope to have a princess without a
battle for her?’ More and much more in this strain, until--for he could
read me and most human beings swiftly on the surface, notwithstanding
the pressure of his fancifulness--he perceived that talking influenced
me far less than activity, and so after a hurried breakfast and
an innocuous glance at the damp morning papers, we started to the
money-lender’s, with Jennings to lend his name. We were in Chippenden
close upon the hour my father had named, bringing to the startled
electors the first news of their member’s death.

During the heat of the canvass for votes I received a kind letter from
the squire in reply to one of mine, wherein he congratulated me on my
prospects of success, and wound up: ‘Glad to see it announced you are
off with that princess of yours. Show them we are as proud as they are,
Harry, and a fig for the whole foreign lot! Come to Riversley soon, and
be happy.’ What did that mean? Heriot likewise said in a letter: ‘So
it’s over? The proud prince kicks? You will not thank me for telling you
now what you know I think about it.’ I appealed to my father. ‘Canvass!
canvass!’ cried he; and he persistently baffled me. It was from Temple
I learnt that on the day of our starting for Chippenden, the newspapers
contained a paragraph in large print flatly denying upon authority that
there was any foundation for the report of an intended marriage between
the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld and an English gentleman. Then
I remembered how that morning my father had flung the papers down,
complaining of their dampness.

Would such denial have appeared without Ottilia’s sanction?

My father proved that I was harnessed to him; there was no stopping, no
time for grieving. Pace was his specific. He dragged me the round of
the voters; he gave dinners at the inn of true Liberals, and ate of them
contentedly; he delivered speeches incessantly. The whole force of his.
serio-comic genius was alive in its element at Chippenden. From balls
and dinners, and a sharp contest to maintain his position in town, he
was down among us by the first morning train, bright as Apollo, and
quite the sun of the place, dazzling the independent electors and their
wives, and even me somewhat; amazing me, certainly. Dettermain, his
lawyer, who had never seen him in action, and supposed he would treat
an election as he did his Case, with fits and starts of energy, was not
less astonished, and tried to curb him.

‘Mr. Dettermain, my dear sir, I apprehend it is the electoral maxim
to woo the widowed borough with the tear in its eye, and I shall do so
hotly, in a right masculine manner,’ my father said. ‘We have the
start; and if we beat the enemy by nothing else we will beat him by
constitution. We are the first in the field, and not to reap it is to
acknowledge oneself deficient in the very first instrument with which
grass was cut.’

Our difficulty all through the election was to contend with his humour.
The many triumphs it won for him, both in speech and in action, turned
at least the dialectics of the argument against us, and amusing,
flattering, or bewildering, contributed to silence and hold us passive.
Political convictions of his own, I think I may say with truth, he had
none. He would have been just as powerful, after his fashion, on the
Tory side, pleading for Mr. Normanton Hipperdon; more, perhaps: he would
have been more in earnest. His store of political axioms was Tory; but
he did remarkably well, and with no great difficulty, in confuting
them to the wives of voters, to the voters themselves, and at public
assemblies. Our adversary was redoubtable; a promising Opposition
member, ousted from his seat in the North--a handsome man, too, which
my father admitted, and wealthy, being junior partner in a City banking
firm. Anna Penrhys knew him, and treacherously revealed some of the
enemy’s secrets, notably concerning what he termed our incorrigible turn
for bribery.

‘And that means,’ my father said, ‘that Mr. Hipperdon does not possess
the art of talking to the ladies. I shall try him in repartee on the
hustings. I must contrive to have our Jorian at my elbow.’

The task of getting Jorian to descend upon such a place as Chippenden
worried my father more than electoral anxieties. Jorian wrote, ‘My best
wishes to you. Be careful of your heads. The habit of the Anglo-Saxon is
to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels. It is his notion of
freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence. Spare
me the Sussex accent on your return.’

My father read out the sentences of this letter with admiring bursts
of indignation at the sarcasms, and an evident idea that I inclined to
jealousy of the force displayed.

‘But we must have him,’ he said; ‘I do not feel myself complete without
Jorian.’

So he made dispositions for a concert to be given in Chippenden town.
Jenny Chassediane was invited down to sing, and Jorian came in her
wake, of course. He came to suffer tortures. She was obliging enough to
transform me into her weapon of chastisement upon the poor fellow for
his behaviour to her at the Ball-atrocious, I was bound to confess.
On this point she hesitated just long enough to imply a doubt whether,
under any circumstances, the dues of men should be considered before
those of her sex, and then struck her hands together with enthusiasm for
my father, who was, she observed--critical in millinery in the height
of her ecstasy--the most majestic, charming, handsome Henri III.
imaginable, the pride and glory of the assembly, only one degree too
rosy at night for the tone of the lavender, needing a touch of French
hands, and the merest trifle in want of compression about the waistband.
She related that a certain Prince Henri d’Angleterre had buzzed at his
ear annoyingly. ‘Et Gascoigne, ou est-il?’ called the King, and the
Judge stepped forth to correct the obstreperous youth. The Judge was
Jennings, clearly prepared by my father to foil the Prince--no other
than Edbury. It was incomprehensible to me that my father should
tolerate the tatter’s pranks; unless, indeed, he borrowed his name to
bonds of which I heard nothing.

Mademoiselle Chassediane vowed that her own dress was ravishing.
She went attired as a boudoir-shepherdess or demurely-coquettish
Sevres-china Ninette, such of whom Louis Quinze would chuck the chin
down the deadly introductory walks of Versailles. The reason of her
desiring to go was the fatal sin of curiosity, and, therefore, her sex’s
burden, not hers. Jorian was a Mousquetaire, with plumes and ruffles
prodigious, and a hen’s heart beneath his cock’s feathers. ‘Pourtant
j’y allai. I saw your great ladies, how they carry themselves when they
would amuse themselves, and, mon Dieu! Paris has done its utmost to
grace their persons, and the length of their robes did the part
of Providence in bestowing height upon them, parceque, vous savez,
Monsieur, c’est extraordinaire comme ils ont les jambes courtes, ces
Anglaises!’ Our aristocracy, however, was not so bad in that respect
as our bourgeoisie; yet it was easy to perceive that our female
aristocracy, though they could ride, had never been drilled to walk: ‘de
belles femmes, oui; seulement, tenez, je n’admire ni les yeux de vache,
ni de souris, ni mime ceux de verre comme ornement feminin. Avec de
l’embonpoint elles font de l’effet, mais maigre il n’y a aucune illusion
possible.’

This vindictive critic smarted, with cause, at the recollection of her
walk out of her rooms. Jorian’s audacity or infatuation quitted him
immediately after he had gratified her whim. The stout Mousquetaire
placed her in a corner, and enveloped her there, declaring that her
petition had been that she might come to see, not to be seen,--as if,
she cried out tearfully, the two wishes must not necessarily exist
together, like the masculine and the feminine in this world! Prince Hal,
acting the most profligate period of his career, espied her behind
the Mousquetaire’s moustache, and did not fail to make much of his
discovery. In a perilous moment for the reputation of the Ball, my
father handed him over to Gascoigne, and conducted Jenny in a leisurely
walk on his arm out of the rooms.

‘Il est comme les Romains,’ she said: ‘he never despairs of himself. It
is a Jupiter! If he must punish you he confers a dignity in doing it.
Now I comprehend, that with such women as these grandes dames Anglaises
I should have done him harm but for his greatness of soul.’

Some harm, I fancied, must have been done, in spite of his boast to the
contrary. He had to be in London every other night, and there were tales
current of intrigues against him which had their sources from very lofty
regions. But in Chippenden he threw off London, just as lightly as in
London he discarded Chippenden. No symptom of personal discouragement,
or of fatigue, was betrayed in his face. I spoke once of that paragraph
purporting to emanate from Prince Ernest.

‘It may,’ he said. ‘Business! Richie.’

He set to counting the promises of votes, disdaining fears and
reflections. Concerts, cricket-matches, Balls, dinner-parties, and the
round of the canvass, and speech-making at our gatherings, occupied
every minute of my time, except on Saturday evenings, when I rode over
to Riversley with Temple to spend the Sunday. Temple, always willing
to play second to me, and a trifle melancholy under his partial
eclipse-which, perhaps, suggested the loss of Janet to him--would have
it that this election was one of the realizations of our boyish dreams
of greatness. The ladies were working rosettes for me. My aunt Dorothy
talked very anxiously about the day appointed by my father to repay the
large sum expended. All hung upon that day, she said, speaking from her
knowledge of the squire. She was moved to an extreme distress by the
subject.

‘He is confident, Harry; but where can he obtain the money? If your
grandfather sees it invested in your name in Government securities, he
will be satisfied, not otherwise: nothing less will satisfy him; and if
that is not done, he will join you and your father together in his mind;
and as he has hitherto treated one he will treat both. I know him. He is
just, to the extent of his vision; but he will not be able to separate
you. He is aware that your father has not restricted his expenses since
they met; he will say you should have used your influence.’

She insisted on this, until the tears streamed from her eyes, telling
me that my grandfather was the most upright and unsuspicious of men,
and precisely on that account the severest when he thought he had been
deceived. The fair chances of my election did not console her, as it did
me, by dazzling me. She affirmed strongly that she was sure my father
expected success at the election to be equivalent to the promised
restitution of the money, and begged me to warn him that nothing short
of the sum squandered would be deemed sufficient at Riversley. My dear
aunt, good woman though she was, seemed to me to be waxing miserly. The
squire had given her the name of Parsimony; she had vexed him, Janet
told me, by subscribing a miserable sum to a sailors’ asylum that
he patronized--a sum he was ashamed to see standing as the gift of
a Beltham; and she had stopped the building of a wing of her village
school-house, designed upon his plan. Altogether, she was fretful and
distressful; she appeared to think that I could have kept my father in
better order. Riversley was hearing new and strange reports of him. But
how could I at Chippenden thwart his proceedings in London? Besides, he
was serving me indefatigably.

It can easily be imagined what description of banter he had to meet and
foil.

‘This gentleman is obliging enough to ask me, “How about the Royal
Arms?” If in his extreme consideration he means to indicate my Arms, I
will inform him that they are open to him; he shall find entertainment
for man and beast; so he is doubly assured of a welcome.’

Questioned whether he did not think he was entitled to be rated at the
value of half-a-crown, he protested that whatever might be the sum of
his worth, he was pure coin, of which neither party in Chippenden could
accuse the silver of rubbing off; and he offered forthwith an impromptu
apologue of a copper penny that passed itself off for a crown-piece, and
deceived a portion of the country: that was why (with a wave of the
arm over the Hipperdon faction) it had a certain number of backers; for
everybody on whom the counterfeit had been foisted, praised it to keep
it in the currency.

‘Now, gentlemen, I apprehend that Chippenden is not the pocket-borough
for Hipperdon coin. Back with him to the Mint! and, with your
permission, we will confiscate the first syllable of his name, while we
consign him to oblivion, with a hip, hip, hip, hurrah for Richmond!’

The cheers responded thunderingly, and were as loud when he answered a
‘How ‘bout the Dauphin?’ by saying that it was the Tory hotel, of which
he knew nothing.

‘A cheer for old Roy!’ Edbury sang out.

My father checked the roar, and turned to him.

‘Marquis of Edbury, come to the front!’

Edbury declined to budge, but the fellows round him edged aside to show
him a mark for my father’s finger.

‘Gentlemen, this is the young Marquis of Edbury, a member of the House
of Lords by right of his birth, born to legislate for you and me. He,
gentlemen, makes our laws. Examine him, hear him, meditate on him.’

He paused cruelly for Edbury to open his mouth. The young lord looked
confounded, and from that moment behaved becomingly.

‘He might have been doing mischief to-morrow,’ my father said to me, and
by letting me conceive his adroitness a matter of design, comforted me
with proofs of intelligent power, and made me feel less the melancholy
conjunction of a piece of mechanism and a piece of criticism, which I
was fast growing to be in the contemplation of the agencies leading
to honour in our land. Edbury whipped his four-in-hand to conduct our
voters to the poll. We had to pull hard against Tory interest. It was a
sharp, dubious, hot day--a day of outcries against undue influence and
against bribery--a day of beer and cheers and the insanest of tricks
to cheat the polling-booth. Old John Thresher of Dipwell, and Farmer
Eckerthy drove over to Chippenden to afford me aid and countenance,
disconcerting me by the sight of them, for I associated them with Janet
rather than with Ottilia, and it was to Ottilia that I should have felt
myself rising when the figures increased their pace in my favour,
and the yeasty mob surrounding my father’s superb four-horsed chariot
responded to his orations by proclaiming me victor.

‘I congratulate you, Mr. Richmond,’ Dettermain said. ‘Up to this day I
have had my fears that we should haul more moonshine than fish in our
net. Your father has accomplished prodigies.’

My father, with the bloom of success on his face, led me aside soon
after a safe majority of upwards of seventy had been officially
announced. ‘Now, Richie,’ said he, ‘you are a Member. Now to the squire
away! Thank the multitude and off, and as quick to Sarkeld as you well
can, and tell the squire from me that I pardon his suspicions. I have
landed you a Member--that will satisfy him. I am willing, tell
him... you know me competent to direct mines... bailiff of his
estates--whatever he pleases, to effect a reconciliation. I must be in
London to-night--I am in the thick of the fray there. No matter: go,
my son.’ He embraced me. It was not a moment for me to catechize him,
though I could see that he was utterly deluded.

Between moonlight and morning, riding with Temple and Captain Bulsted on
either side of me, I drew rein under the red Grange windows, tired,
and in love with its air of sleepy grandeur. Janet’s window was open.
I hailed her. ‘Has he won?’ she sang out in the dark of her room, as
though the cry of delight came upon the leap from bed. She was dressed.
She had commissioned Farmer Eckerthy to bring her the news at any hour
of the night. Seeing me, she clapped hands. ‘Harry, I congratulate you
a thousand times.’ She had wit to guess that I should never have thought
of coming had I not been the winner. I could just discern the curve and
roll of her famed thick brown hair in the happy shrug of her shoulder,
and imagined the full stream of it as she leaned out of window to talk
to us.

Janet herself, unfastened the hall-door bolts. She caressed the horses,
feverishly exulting, with charming subdued laughter of victory and
welcome, and amused us by leading my horse round to stables, and
whistling for one of the lads, playing what may, now and then, be a
pretty feature in a young woman of character--the fair tom-boy girl. She
and her maid prepared coffee and toast for us, and entered the hall,
one after the other, laden with dishes of cold meat; and not until the
captain had eaten well did she tell him slyly that somebody, whom she
had brought to Riversley yesterday, was abed and asleep upstairs. The
slyness and its sisterly innocence lit up our eyes, and our hearts
laughed. Her cheeks were deliciously overcoloured. We stole I know not
what from the night and the day, and conventional circumstances, and
rallied Captain Bulsted, and behaved as decorous people who treat the
night properly, and live by rule, do not quite do. Never since Janet was
a girl had I seen her so spirited and responsive: the womanly armour of
half-reserve was put away. We chatted with a fresh-hearted natural young
creature who forfeited not a particle of her ladyship while she made
herself our comrade in talk and frolic.

Janet and I walked part of the way to the station with Temple, who had
to catch an early train, and returning--the song of skylarks covering
us--joined hands, having our choice between nothing to say, and the
excess; perilous both.



CHAPTER XLIV. MY FATHER IS MIRACULOUSLY RELIEVED BY FORTUNE

My grandfather had a gratification in my success, mingled with a
transparent jealousy of the chief agent in procuring it. He warned me
when I left him that he was not to be hoodwinked: he must see the money
standing in my name on the day appointed. His doubts were evident, but
he affected to be expectant. Not a word of Sarkeld could be spoken.
My success appeared to be on a more visionary foundation the higher I
climbed.

Now Jorian DeWitt had affirmed that the wealthy widow Lady Sampleman was
to be had by my father for the asking. Placed as we were, I regarded the
objections to his alliance with her in a mild light. She might lend me
the money to appease the squire; that done, I would speedily repay it.
I admitted, in a letter to my aunt Dorothy, the existing objections: but
the lady had long been enamoured of him, I pleaded, and he was past
the age for passionate affection, and would infallibly be courteous and
kind. She was rich. We might count on her to watch over him carefully.
Of course, with such a wife, he would sink to a secondary social sphere;
was it to be regretted if he did? The letter was a plea for my own
interests, barely veiled.

At the moment of writing it, and moreover when I treated my father with
especial coldness, my heart was far less warm in the contemplation of
its pre-eminent aim than when I was suffering him to endanger it, almost
without a protest. Janet and a peaceful Riversley, and a life of quiet
English distinction, beckoned to me visibly, and not hatefully. The
image of Ottilia conjured up pictures of a sea of shipwrecks, a scene
of immeasurable hopelessness. Still, I strove toward that. My strivings
were against my leanings, and imagining the latter, which involved no
sacrifice of the finer sense of honour, to be in the direction of
my lower nature, I repelled them to preserve a lofty aim that led me
through questionable ways.

‘Can it be you, Harry,’ my aunt Dorothy’s reply ran (I had anticipated
her line of reasoning, though not her warmth), ‘who advise him to this
marriage from a motive so inexplicably unworthy? That you will repay
her the money, I do not require your promise to assure me. The money
is nothing. It is the prospect of her life and fortune which you are
consenting, if not urging him, to imperil for your own purposes. Are you
really prepared to imitate in him, with less excuse for doing it, the
things you most condemn? Let it be checked at the outset. It cannot be.
A marriage of inclination on both sides, prudent in a worldly sense, we
might wish for him, perhaps, if he could feel quite sure of himself.
His wife might persuade him not to proceed in his law-case. There I
have long seen his ruin. He builds such expectations on it! You speak
of something worse than a mercenary marriage. I see this in your
handwriting!--your approval of it! I have to check the whisper that
tells me it reads like a conspiracy. Is she not a simpleton? Can you
withhold your pity? and pitying, can you possibly allow her to be
entrapped? Forgive my seeming harshness. I do not often speak to my
Harry so. I do now because I must appeal to you, as the one chiefly
responsible, on whose head the whole weight of a dreadful error will
fall. Oh! my dearest, be guided by the purity of your feelings to
shun doubtful means. I have hopes that after the first few weeks your
grandfather will--I know he does not ‘expect to find the engagement
fulfilled--be the same to you that he was before he discovered the
extravagance. You are in Parliament, and I am certain, that by keeping
as much as possible to yourself, and living soberly, your career there
will persuade him to meet your wishes.’

The letter was of great length. In conclusion, she entreated me to
despatch an answer by one of the early morning trains; entreating me
once more to cause ‘any actual deed’ to be at least postponed. The
letter revealed what I had often conceived might be.

My rejoinder to my aunt Dorothy laid stress on my father’s pledge of his
word of honour as a gentleman to satisfy the squire on a stated day. I
shrank from the idea of the Riversley crow over him. As to the lady, I
said we would see that her money was fastened to her securely before she
committed herself to the deeps. The money to be advanced to me would lie
at my bankers, in my name,--untouched: it would be repaid in the bulk
after a season. This I dwelt on particularly, both to satisfy her and
to appease my sense of the obligation. An airy pleasantry in the tone of
this epistle amused me while writing it and vexed me when it had gone.
But a letter sent, upon special request, by railway, should not, I
thought, be couched in the ordinary strain. Besides one could not write
seriously of a person like Lady Sampleman.

I consulted my aunt Dorothy’s scruples by stopping my father on his way
to the lady. His carriage was at the door: I suggested money-lenders: he
had tried them all. He begged me to permit him to start: but it was
too ignominious to think of its being done under my very eyes, and
I refused. He had tried the money-lenders yesterday. They required a
mortgage solider than expectations for the sum we wanted. Dettermain
and Newson had declined to undertake the hypothecation of his annuity.
Providence pointed to Sampleman.

‘You change in a couple of nights, Richie,’ said he. ‘Now I am always
the identical man. I shall give happiness to one sincerely good soul. I
have only to offer myself--let me say in becoming modesty, I believe so.
Let me go to her and have it over, for with me a step taken is a thing
sanctified. I have in fact held her in reserve. Not that I think Fortune
has abandoned us: but a sagacious schemer will not leave everything to
the worthy Dame. I should have driven to her yesterday, if I had not
heard from Dettermain and Newson that there was a hint of a negotiation
for a compromise. Government is fairly frightened.’

He mused. ‘However, I slept on it, and arrived at the conclusion this
morning that my old Richie stood in imminent jeopardy of losing the
fruit of all my toil. The good woman will advance the money to her
husband. When I pledged my word to the squire I had reason to imagine
the two months a sufficient time. We have still a couple of days. I have
heard of men who lost heart at the eleventh hour, and if they had
only hung on, with gallant faith in themselves, they would have been
justified by the result. Faith works miracles. At least it allows time
for them.’

His fertile ingenuity spared mine the task of persuading him to postpone
the drive to Lady Sampleman. But that he would have been prompt to
go, at a word from me, and was actually about to go when I entered his
house, I could not question.

He drove in manifest relief of mind to Dettermain and Newson’s.

I had an appointment with Mr. Temple at a great political Club, to meet
the gentlemen who were good enough to undertake the introduction of
the infant member to the House of Commons. My incessantly twisting
circumstances foiled the pleasure and pride due to me. From the Club I
bent my steps to Temple’s district, and met in the street young Eckart
vom Hof, my champion and second on a memorable occasion, fresh upon
London, and looking very Germanic in this drab forest of our city
people. He could hardly speak of Deutschland for enthusiasm at the sight
of the moving masses. His object in coming to England, he assured me
honestly, was to study certain editions of Tibullus in the British
Museum. When he deigned to speak of Sarkeld, it was to say that Prince
Hermann was frequently there. I gave him no chance to be sly, though he
pushed for it, at a question of the Princess Ottilia’s health.

The funeral pace of the block of cabs and omnibuses engrossed his
attention. Suddenly the Englishman afforded him an example of the
reserve of impetuosity we may contain. I had seen my aunt Dorothy in a
middle line of cabs coming from the City, and was darting in a twinkling
among wheels and shafts and nodding cab-horse noses to take her hand and
know the meaning of her presence in London. She had family business to
do: she said no more. I mentioned that I had checked my father for a day
or two. She appeared grateful. Her anxiety was extreme that she might
not miss the return train, so I relinquished her hand, commanded the
cabman to hasten, and turned to rescue Eckart--too young and faithful
a collegian not to follow his friend, though it were into the lion’s
den-from a terrific entanglement of horseflesh and vehicles brawled over
by a splendid collision of tongues. Secure on the pavement again,
Eckart humbly acknowledged that the English tongue could come out upon
occasions. I did my best to amuse him.

Whether it amused him to see me take my seat in the House of Commons,
and hear a debate in a foreign language, I cannot say; but the only
pleasure of which I was conscious at that period lay in the thought that
he or his father, Baron vom Hof, might some day relate the circumstance
at Prince Ernest’s table, and fix in Ottilia’s mind the recognition of
my having tried to perform my part of the contract. Beggared myself, and
knowing Prince Hermann to be in Sarkeld, all I hoped for was to show
her I had followed the path she traced. My state was lower: besides
misfortune I now found myself exalted only to feel my profound
insignificance.

‘The standard for the House is a man’s ability to do things,’ said
Charles Etherell, my friendly introductor, by whom I was passingly,
perhaps ironically, advised to preserve silence for two or three
sessions.

He counselled the study of Foreign Affairs for a present theme. I talked
of our management of them, in the strain of Dr. Julius von Karsteg.

‘That’s journalism, or clippings from a bilious essay; it won’t do for
the House,’ he said. ‘Revile the House to the country, if you like, but
not the country to the House.’

When I begged him to excuse my absurdity, he replied:

‘It’s full of promise, so long as you’re silent.’

But to be silent was to be merely an obedient hound of the whip. And if
the standard for the House was a man’s ability to do things, I was in
the seat of a better man. External sarcasms upon the House, flavoured
with justness, came to my mind, but if these were my masters surrounding
me, how indefinitely small must I be!

Leaving the House on that first night of my sitting, I received Temple’s
congratulations outside, and, as though the sitting had exhausted
every personal sentiment, I became filled with his; under totally new
sensations, I enjoyed my distinction through the perception of my old
comrade’s friendly jealousy.

‘I’ll be there, too, some day,’ he said, moaning at the prospect of an
extreme age before such honours would befall him.

The society of Eckart prevented me from urging him to puff me up with
his talk as I should have wished, and after I had sent the German to be
taken care of by Mrs. Waddy, I had grown so accustomed to the worldly
view of my position that I was fearing for its stability. Threats of a
petition against me were abroad. Supposing the squire disinherited
me, could I stand? An extraordinary appetite for wealth, a novel
appreciation of it--which was, in truth, a voluntary enlistment into the
army of mankind, and the adoption of its passions--pricked me with an
intensity of hope and dread concerning my dependence on my grandfather.
I lay sleepless all night, tossing from Riversley to Sarkeld, condemned,
it seemed, to marry Janet and gain riches and power by renouncing my
hope of the princess and the glory belonging to her, unless I should
within a few hours obtain a show of figures at my bankers.

I had promised Etherell to breakfast with him. A note--a faint
scream--despatched by Mrs. Waddy to Mr. Temple’s house informed me that
‘the men’ were upon them. If so, they were the forerunners of a horde,
and my father was as good as extinguished. He staked everything on
success; consequently, he forfeited pity.

Good-bye to ambition, I thought, and ate heartily, considering robustly
the while how far lower than the general level I might avoid falling.
The report of the debates in morning papers--doubtless, more flowing
and, perhaps, more grammatical than such as I gave ear to overnight--had
the odd effect on me of relieving me from the fit of subserviency into
which the speakers had sunk me.

A conceit of towering superiority took its place, and as Etherell was
kind enough to draw me out and compliment me, I was attacked by a tragic
sense of contrast between my capacities and my probable fortunes. It was
open to me to marry Janet. But this meant the loosening of myself with
my own hand for ever from her who was my mentor and my glory, to gain
whom I was in the very tideway. I could not submit to it, though the
view was like that of a green field of the springs passed by a climber
up the crags. I went to Anna Penrhys to hear a woman’s voice, and
partly told her of my troubles. She had heard Mr. Hipperdon express his
confident opinion that he should oust me from my seat. Her indignation
was at my service as a loan: it sprang up fiercely and spontaneously in
allusions to something relating to my father, of which the Marquis of
Edbury had been guilty. ‘How you can bear it!’ she exclaimed, for I was
not wordy. The exclamation, however, stung me to put pen to paper--the
woman was not so remote in me as not to be roused by the woman. I wrote
to Edbury, and to Heriot, bidding him call on the young nobleman. Late
at night I was at my father’s door to perform the act of duty of seeing
him, and hearing how he had entertained Eckart, if he was still master
of his liberty. I should have known him better: I expected silence and
gloom. The windows were lighted brilliantly. As the hall-door opened, a
band of stringed and wood instruments commenced an overture. Mrs. Waddy
came to me in the hall; she was unintelligible. One thing had happened
to him at one hour of the morning, and another at another hour. He was
at one moment suffering the hands of the ‘officers’ on his shoulder:

‘And behold you, Mr. Harry! a knock, a letter from a messenger, and he
conquers Government!’ It struck me that the epitome of his life had been
played in a day: I was quite incredulous of downright good fortune.
He had been giving a dinner followed by a concert, and the deafening
strains of the music clashed with my acerb spirit, irritating me
excessively. ‘Where are those men you spoke of?’ I asked her. ‘Gone,’
she replied, ‘gone long ago!’

‘Paid?’ said I.

She was afraid to be precise, but repeated that they were long since
gone.

I singled Jorian DeWitt from among the crowd of loungers on the stairs
and landing between the drawing-rooms. ‘Oh, yes, Government has struck
its flag to him,’ Jorian said. ‘Why weren’t you here to dine? Alphonse
will never beat his achievement of to-day. Jenny and Carigny gave us a
quarter-of-an-hour before dinner--a capital idea!--“VEUVE ET BACHELIER.”
 As if by inspiration. No preparation for it, no formal taking of seats.
It seized amazingly--floated small talk over the soup beautifully.’

I questioned him again.

‘Oh, dear, yes; there can’t be a doubt about it,’ he answered, airily.
‘Roy Richmond has won his game.’

Two or three urgent men round a great gentleman were extracting his
affable approbation of the admirable nature of the experiment of the
Chassediane before dinner. I saw that Eckart was comfortably seated, and
telling Jorian to provide for him in the matter of tobacco, I went to
my room, confused beyond power of thought by the sensible command of
fortune my father, fortune’s sport at times, seemed really to have.

His statement of the circumstances bewildered me even more. He was in
no hurry to explain them; when we met next morning he waited for me to
question him, and said, ‘Yes. I think we have beaten them so far!’ His
mind was pre-occupied, he informed me, concerning the defence of a lady
much intrigued against, and resuming the subject: ‘Yes, we have beaten
them up to a point, Richie. And that reminds me: would you have me go
down to Riversley and show the squire the transfer paper? At any rate
you can now start for Sarkeld, and you do, do you not? To-day: to-morrow
at latest.’

I insisted: ‘But how, and in what manner has this money been paid?’ The
idea struck me that he had succeeded in borrowing it.

‘Transferred to me in the Bank, and intelligence of the fact sent to
Dettermain and Newson, my lawyers,’ he replied. ‘Beyond that, I know as
little as you, Richie, though indubitably I hoped to intimidate them.
If,’ he added, with a countenance perfectly simple and frank, ‘they
expect me to take money for a sop, I am not responsible, as I by no
means provoked it, for their mistake.

‘I proceed. The money is useful to you, so I rejoice at it.’

Five and twenty thousand pounds was the amount.

‘No stipulation was attached to it?’

‘None. Of course a stipulation was implied: but of that I am not bound
to be cognizant.’

‘Absurd!’ I cried: ‘it can’t have come from the quarter you suspect.’

‘Where else?’ he asked.

I thought of the squire, Lady Edbury, my aunt, Lady Sampleman, Anna
Penrhys, some one or other of his frantic female admirers. But the
largeness of the amount, and the channel selected for the payment,
precluded the notion that any single person had come to succour him in
his imminent need, and, as it chanced, mine.

Observing that my speculations wavered, he cited numerous instances in
his life of the special action of Providence in his favour, and was
bold enough to speak of a star, which his natural acuteness would have
checked his doing before me, if his imagination had not been seriously
struck.

‘You hand the money over to me, sir?’ I said.

‘Without a moment of hesitation, my dear boy,’ he melted me by
answering.

‘You believe you have received a bribe?’

‘That is my entire belief--the sole conclusion I can arrive at. I will
tell you, Richie: the old Marquis of Edbury once placed five thousand
pounds to my account on a proviso that I should--neglect, is the better
word, my Case. I inherited from him at his death; of course his
demise cancelled the engagement. He had been the friend of personages
implicated. He knew. I suspect he apprehended the unpleasant position of
a witness.’

‘But what was the stipulation you presume was implied?’ said I.

‘Something that passed between lawyers: I am not bound to be cognizant
of it. Abandon my claims for a few thousands? Not for ten, not for ten
hundred times the sum!’

To be free from his boisterous influence, which made my judgement as
unsteady as the weather-glass in a hurricane, I left my house and went
straight to Dettermain and Newson, who astonished me quite as much
by assuring me that the payment of the money was a fact. There was no
mystery about it. The intelligence and transfer papers, they said, had
not been communicated to them by the firm they were opposed to, but by
a solicitor largely connected with the aristocracy; and his letter had
briefly declared the unknown donator’s request that legal proceedings
should forthwith be stopped. They offered no opinion of their own.
Suggestions of any kind, they seemed to think, had weight, and all of
them an equal weight, to conclude from the value they assigned to every
idea of mine. The name of the solicitor in question was Charles Adolphus
Bannerbridge. It was, indeed, my old, one of my oldest friends; the same
by whom I had been led to a feast and an evening of fun when a little
fellow starting in the London streets. Sure of learning the whole truth
from old Mr. Bannerbridge, I walked to his office and heard that he had
suddenly been taken ill. I strode on to his house, and entered a house
of mourning. The kind old man, remembered by me so vividly, had died
overnight. Miss Bannerbridge perceived that I had come on an errand, and
with her gentle good breeding led me to speak of it. She knew nothing
whatever of the sum of money. She was, however, aware that an annuity
had been regularly paid through the intervention of her father. I was
referred by her to a Mr. Richards, his recently-established partner.
This gentleman was ignorant of the whole transaction.

Throughout the day I strove to combat the pressure of evidence in favour
of the idea that an acknowledgement of special claims had been wrested
from the enemy. Temple hardly helped me, though his solid sense was
dead against the notions entertained by my father and Jorian DeWitt,
and others besides, our elders. The payment of the sum through the same
channel which supplied the annuity, pointed distinctly to an admission
of a claim, he inclined to think, and should be supposed to come from
a personage having cause either to fear him or to assist him. He set my
speculations astray by hinting that the request for the stopping of
the case might be a blind. A gift of money, he said shrewdly, was
a singularly weak method of inducing a man to stop the suit of a
life-time. I thought of Lady Edbury; but her income was limited, and
her expenditure was not of Lady Sampleman, but it was notorious that she
loved her purse as well as my aunt Dorothy, and was even more, in the
squire’s phrase, ‘a petticoated parsimony.’ Anna Penrhys appeared the
likelier, except for the fact that the commencement of the annuity was
long before our acquaintance with her. I tried her on the subject.
Her amazement was without a shadow of reserve. ‘It ‘s Welsh, it’s not
English,’ she remarked. I knew no Welshwoman save Anna.

‘Do you know the whole of his history?’ said she. Possibly one of the
dozen unknown episodes in it might have furnished the clue, I agreed
with her.

The sight of twenty-one thousand pounds placed to my credit in the Funds
assuaged my restless spirit of investigation. Letters from the squire
and my aunt Dorothy urged me to betake myself to Riversley, there
finally to decide upon what my course should be.

‘Now that you have the money, pray,’ St. Parsimony wrote,--‘pray be
careful of it. Do not let it be encroached on. Remember it is to serve
one purpose. It should be guarded strictly against every appeal for
aid,’ etc., with much underlining.

My grandfather returned the papers. His letter said ‘I shall not break
my word. Please to come and see me before you take steps right or left.’

So here was the dawn again.

I could in a day or two start for Sarkeld. Meanwhile, to give my father
a lesson, I discharged a number of bills, and paid off the bond to which
Edbury’s name was attached. My grandfather, I knew, was too sincerely
and punctiliously a gentleman in practical conduct to demand a further
inspection of my accounts. These things accomplished, I took the train
for Riversley, and proceeded from the station to Durstan, where I knew
Heriot to be staying. Had I gone straight to my grandfather, there would
have been another story to tell.



CHAPTER XLV. WITHIN AN INCH OF MY LIFE

A single tent stood in a gully running from one of the gravel-pits of
the heath, near an iron-red rillet, and a girl of Kiomi’s tribe leaned
over the lazy water at half length, striking it with her handkerchief.
At a distance of about twice a stone’s-throw from the new carriage-road
between Durstan and Bulsted, I fancied from old recollections she might
be Kiomi herself. This was not the time for her people to be camping on
Durstan. Besides, I feared it improbable that one would find her in any
of the tracks of her people. The noise of the wheels brought the girl’s
face round to me. She was one of those who were babies in the tents when
I was a boy. We were too far apart for me to read her features. I lay
back in the carriage, thinking that it would have been better for my
poor little wild friend if I had never crossed the shadow of her tents.
A life caught out of its natural circle is as much in danger of being
lost as a limb given to a wheel in spinning machinery; so it occurred to
me, until I reflected that Prince Ernest might make the same remark, and
deplore the damage done to the superior machinery likewise.

My movements appeared to interest the girl. She was up on a mound of
the fast-purpling heath, shading her eyes to watch me, when I called at
Bulsted lodge-gates to ask for a bed under Julia’s roof that night. Her
bare legs twinkled in a nimble pace on the way to Durstan Hall, as if
she was determined to keep me in sight. I waved my hand to her. She
stopped. A gipsy’s girl’s figure is often as good an index to her
mind as her face, and I perceived that she had not taken my greeting
favourably; nor would she advance a step to my repeated beckonings; I
tried hat, handkerchief, purse, in vain. My driver observed that she was
taken with a fit of the obstinacy of ‘her lot.’ He shouted, ‘Silver,’
and then ‘Fortune.’ She stood looking. The fellow discoursed on the
nature of gipsies. Foxes were kept for hunting, he said; there was
reason in that. Why we kept gipsies none could tell. He once backed a
gipsy prizefighter, who failed to keep his appointment. ‘Heart sunk too
low below his belt, sir. You can’t reckon on them for performances. And
that same man afterwards fought the gamest fight in the chronicles o’
the Ring! I knew he had it in him. But they’re like nothing better than
the weather; you can’t put money on ‘em and feel safe.’ Consequently he
saw no good in them.

‘She sticks to her post,’ he said, as we turned into the Durstan
grounds. The girl was like a flag-staff on the upper line of heathland.

Heriot was strolling, cigar in mouth, down one of the diminutive alleys
of young fir in this upstart estate. He affected to be prepossessed
by the case between me and Edbury, and would say nothing of his own
affairs, save that he meant to try for service in one of the Continental
armies; he whose susceptible love for his country was almost a malady.
But he had given himself to women it was Cissy this, Trichy that,
and the wiles of a Florence, the spites of an Agatha, duperies,
innocent-seemings, witcheries, reptile-tricks of the fairest of women,
all through his conversation. He had so saturated himself with the
resources, evasions, and desperate cruising of these light creatures
of wind, tide, and tempest, that, like one who has been gazing on the
whirligoround, he saw the whole of women running or only waiting for
a suitable partner to run the giddy ring to perdition and an atoning
pathos.

I cut short one of Heriot’s narratives by telling him that this picking
bones of the dish was not to my taste. He twitted me with turning
parson. I spoke of Kiomi. Heriot flushed, muttering, ‘The little devil!’
with his usual contemplative relish of devilry. We parted, feeling that
severe tension of the old links keeping us together which indicates the
lack of new ones: a point where simple affection must bear the strain
of friendship if it can. Heriot had promised to walk half-way with me to
Bulsted, in spite of Lady Maria’s childish fears of some attack on him.
He was now satisfied with a good-bye at the hall-doors, and he talked
ostentatiously of a method that he had to bring Edbury up to the mark.
I knew that same loud decreeing talk to be a method on his own behalf
of concealing his sensitive resentment at the tone I had adopted: Lady
Maria’s carriage had gone to fetch her husband from a political dinner.
My portmanteau advised me to wait for its return. Durstan and Riversley
were at feud, however, owing to some powerful rude English used toward
the proprietor of the former place by the squire; so I thought it better
to let one of the grooms shoulder my luggage, and follow him.

The night was dark; he chose the roadway, and I crossed the heath,
meeting an exhilarating high wind that made my blood race: Egoism is not
peculiar to any period of life; it is only especially curious in a
young man beginning to match himself against his elders, for in him
it suffuses the imagination; he is not merely selfishly sentient, or
selfishly scheming: his very conceptions are selfish. I remember walking
at my swiftest pace, blaming everybody I knew for insufficiency, for
want of subordination to my interests, for poverty of nature, grossness,
blindness to the fine lights shining in me; I blamed the Fates for
harassing me, circumstances for not surrounding me with friends worthy
of me. The central ‘I’ resembled the sun of this universe, with the
difference that it shrieked for nourishment, instead of dispensing it.

My monstrous conceit of elevation will not suffer condensation into
sentences. What I can testify to is, that for making you bless the legs
you stand on, a knockdown blow is a specific. I had it before I knew
that a hand was up. I should have fancied that I had run athwart a tree,
but for the recollection, as I was reeling to the ground, of a hulk of
a fellow suddenly fronting me, and he did not hesitate with his fist. I
went over and over into a heathery hollow. The wind sang shrill
through the furzes; nothing was visible but black clumps, black cloud.
Astonished though I was, and shaken, it flashed through me that this was
not the attack of a highwayman. He calls upon you to stand and deliver:
it is a foe that hits without warning. The blow took me on the forehead,
and might have been worse. Not seeing the enemy, curiosity was almost as
strong in me as anger; but reflecting that I had injured no one I knew
of, my nerves were quickly at the right pitch. Brushing some spikes of
furze off my hands, I prepared for it. A cry rose. My impression seemed
to be all backward, travelling up to me a moment or two behind time. I
recognised a strange tongue in the cry, but too late that it was Romany
to answer it. Instantly a voice was audible above the noisy wind: ‘I
spot him.’ Then began some good and fair fighting. I got my footing
on grass, and liked the work. The fellow facing me was unmistakably
gipsy-build. I, too, had length of arm, and a disposition to use it
by hitting straight out, with footing firm, instead of dodging and
capering, which told in my favour, and is decidedly the best display of
the noble art on a dark night.

My dancer went over as neatly as I had preceded him; and therewith I
considered enough was done for vengeance. The thrill of a salmon on the
gut is known to give a savage satisfaction to our original nature; it
is but an extension and attenuation of the hearty contentment springing
from a thorough delivery of the fist upon the prominent features of an
assailant that yields to it perforce. Even when you receive such perfect
blows you are half satisfied. Feeling conqueror, my wrath was soothed;
I bent to have a look at my ruffian, and ask him what cause of complaint
gipsies camping on Durstan could find against Riversley. A sharp stroke
on the side of my neck sent me across his body. He bit viciously.
In pain and desperation I flew at another of the tawny devils. They
multiplied. I took to my heels; but this was the vainest of stratagems,
they beat me in nimbleness. Four of them were round me when I wheeled
breathless to take my chance at fighting the odds. Fiery men have not
much notion of chivalry: gipsies the least of all. They yelled disdain
of my summons to them to come on one by one: ‘Now they had caught me,
now they would pay me, now they would pound me; and, standing at four
corners, they commended me to think of becoming a jelly. Four though
they were, they kept their positions; they left it to me to rush in
for a close; the hinder ones held out of arms’ reach so long as I was
disengaged. I had perpetually to shift my front, thinking--Oh, for a
stick! any stout bit of timber! My fists ached, and a repetition of
nasty dull knocks on back and neck, slogging thumps dealt by men getting
to make sure of me, shattered my breathing.

I cried out for a pause, offered to take a couple of them at a time: I
challenged three-the fourth to bide. I was now the dancer: left, right,
and roundabout I had to swing, half-stunned, half-strangled with gorge.
Those terrible blows in the back did the mischief. Sickness threatened
to undermine me. Boxers have breathing-time: I had none. Stiff and sick,
I tried to run; I tottered, I stood to be knocked down, I dropped like
a log-careless of life. But I smelt earth keenly, and the damp grass and
the devil’s play of their feet on my chin, chest, and thighs, revived
a fit of wrath enough to set me staggering on my legs again. They
permitted it, for the purpose of battering me further. I passed from
down to up mechanically, and enjoyed the chestful of air given me in the
interval of rising: thought of Germany and my father, and Janet at her
window, complacently; raised a child’s voice in my throat for mercy,
quite inaudible, and accepted my punishment. One idea I had was, that I
could not possibly fail as a speaker after this--I wanted but a minute’s
grace to fetch breath for an oration, beginning, ‘You fools!’ for
I guessed that they had fallen upon the wrong man. Not a second was
allowed. Soon the shrewd physical bracing, acting momentarily on
my brain, relaxed; the fitful illumination ceased: all ideas faded
out-clung about my beaten body-fled. The body might have been tossed
into its grave, for aught I knew.



CHAPTER XLVI. AMONG GIPSY WOMEN

I cannot say how long it was after my senses had gone when I began to
grope for them on the warmest of heaving soft pillows, and lost the
slight hold I had on them with the effort. Then came a series of
climbings and fallings, risings to the surface and sinkings fathoms
below. Any attempt to speculate pitched me back into darkness. Gifted
with a pair of enormous eyes, which threw surrounding objects to a
distance of a mile away, I could not induce the diminutive things to
approach; and shutting eyes led to such a rolling of mountains in my
brain, that, terrified by the gigantic revolution, I lay determinedly
staring; clothed, it seemed positive, in a tight-fitting suit of
sheet-lead; but why? I wondered why, and immediately received an
extinguishing blow. My pillow was heavenly; I was constantly being
cooled on it, and grew used to hear a croon no more musical than the
unstopped reed above my head; a sound as of a breeze about a cavern’s
mouth, more soothing than a melody. Conjecture of my state, after
hovering timidly in dread of relapses, settled and assured me I was
lying baked, half-buried in an old river-bed; moss at my cheek, my body
inextricable; water now and then feebly striving to float me out, with
horrid pain, with infinite refreshingness. A shady light, like the light
through leafage, I could see; the water I felt. Why did it keep trying
to move me? I questioned and sank to the depths again.

The excruciated patient was having his wet bandages folded across his
bruises, and could not bear a motion of the mind.

The mind’s total apathy was the sign of recovering health. Kind nature
put that district to sleep while she operated on the disquieted lower
functions. I looked on my later self as one observes the mossy bearded
substances travelling blind along the undercurrent of the stream,
clinging to this and that, twirling absurdly.

Where was I? Not in a house. But for my condition of absolute calm,
owing to skilful treatment, open air, and physical robustness, the scene
would have been of a kind to scatter the busy little workmen setting up
the fabric of my wits. A lighted oil-cup stood on a tripod in the middle
of a tent-roof, and over it the creased neck and chin of a tall old
woman, splendid in age, reddened vividly; her black eyes and grey brows,
and greyishblack hair fell away in a dusk of their own. I thought her
marvellous. Something she held in her hands that sent a thin steam
between her and the light. Outside, in the A cutting of the tent’s
threshold, a heavy-coloured sunset hung upon dark land. My pillow
meantime lifted me gently at a regular measure, and it was with
untroubled wonder that I came to the knowledge of a human heart beating
within it. So soft could only be feminine; so firm still young. The
bosom was Kiomi’s. A girl sidled at the opening of the tent, peeping
in, and from a mufed rattle of subpectoral thunder discharged at her in
quick heated snaps, I knew Kiomi’s voice. After an altercation of their
monotonous gipsy undertones, the girl dropped and crouched outside.

It was morning when I woke next, stronger, and aching worse. I was lying
in the air, and she who served for nurse, pillow, parasol, and bank of
herbage, had her arms round beneath mine cherishingly, all the fingers
outspread and flat on me, just as they had been when I went to sleep.

‘Kiomi!’

‘Now, you be quiet.’

‘Can I stand up a minute or two?’

‘No, and you won’t talk.’

I submitted. This was our duel all day: she slipped from me only twice,
and when she did the girl took her place.

I began to think of Bulsted and Riversley.

‘Kiomi, how long have I been here?’

‘You ‘ll be twice as long as you’ve been.’

‘A couple of days?’

‘More like a dozen.’

‘Just tell me what happened.’

‘Ghm-m-m,’ she growled admonishingly.

Reflecting on it, I felt sure there must have been searching parties
over the heath.

‘Kiomi, I say, how was it they missed me?’

She struck at once on my thought.

‘They’re fools.’

‘How did you cheat them?’

‘I didn’t tie a handkercher across their eyes.’

‘You half smothered me once, in the combe.’

‘You go to sleep.’

‘Have you been doctor?’

The growling tigerish ‘Ghm-m-m’ constrained me to take it for a lullaby.

‘Kiomi, why the deuce did your people attack me?’ She repeated the sound
resembling that which sometimes issues from the vent of a mine; but I
insisted upon her answering.

‘I ‘ll put you down and be off,’ she threatened.

‘Brute of a girl! I hate you!’

‘Hate away.’

‘Tell me who found me.’

‘I shan’t. You shut your peepers.’

The other and younger girl sung out: ‘I found you.’

Kiomi sent a volley at her.

‘I did,’ said the girl; ‘yes, and I nursed you first, I did; and mother
doctored you. Kiomi hasn’t been here a day.’

The old mother came out of the tent. She felt my pulse, and forthwith
squatted in front of me. ‘You’re hard to kill, and oily as a bean,’ said
she. ‘You’ve only to lie quiet in the sun like a handsome gentleman; I’m
sure you couldn’t wish for more. Air and water’s the doctor for such as
you. You’ve got the bound in you to jump the ditch: don’t you fret at
it, or you’ll lose your spring, my good gentleman.’

‘Leave off talking to me as a stranger,’ I bawled. ‘Out with it; why
have you kept me here? Why did your men pitch into me?’

‘OUR men, my good gentleman!’ the old woman ejaculated. There was
innocence indeed! sufficient to pass the whole tribe before a bench of
magistrates. She wheedled: ‘What have they against a handsome gentleman
like you? They’d run for you fifty mile a day, and show you all their
tricks and secrets for nothing.’

My despot Kiomi fired invectives at her mother. The old mother retorted;
the girl joined in. All three were scowling, flashing, showing teeth,
driving the wordy javelin upon one another, indiscriminately, or two to
one, without a pause; all to a sound like the slack silver string of the
fiddle.

I sang out truce to them; they racked me with laughter; and such
laughter!--the shaking of husks in a half-empty sack.

Ultimately, on a sudden cessation of the storm of tongues, they agreed
that I must have my broth.

Sheer weariness, seasoned with some hope that the broth would give me
strength to mount on my legs and walk, persuaded me to drink it. Still
the old mother declared that none of her men would ever have laid hands
on me. Why should they? she asked. What had I done to them? Was it their
way?

Kiomi’s arms tightened over my breast. The involuntary pressure was like
an illumination to me.

No longer asking for the grounds of the attack on a mistaken person,
and bowing to the fiction that none of the tribe had been among my
assailants, I obtained information. The girl Eveleen had spied me
entering Durstan. Quite by chance, she was concealed near Bulsted Park
gates when the groom arrived and told the lodge-keeper that Mr. Harry
Richmond was coming up over the heath, and might have lost his way.
‘Richmond!’ the girl threw a world of meaning into the unexpected name.
Kiomi clutched me to her bosom, but no one breathed the name we had in
our thoughts.

Eveleen and the old mother had searched for me upon the heath, and
having haled me head and foot to their tent, despatched a message to
bring Kiomi down from London to aid them in their desperate shift. They
knew Squire Beltham’s temper. He would have scattered the tribe to the
shores of the kingdom at a rumour of foul play to his grandson. Kiomi
came in time to smuggle me through an inspection of the tent and
cross-examination of its ostensible denizens by Captain Bulsted, who had
no suspicions, though he was in a state of wonderment. Hearing all
this, I was the first to say it would be better I should get out of the
neighbourhood as soon as my legs should support me. The grin that goes
for a laugh among gipsies followed my question of how Kiomi had managed
to smuggle me. Eveleen was my informant when the dreaded Kiomi happened
to be off duty for a minute. By a hasty transformation, due to a
nightcap on the bandages about the head, and an old petticoat over my
feet, Captain William’s insensible friend was introduced to him as the
sore sick great-grandmother of the tribe, mother of Kiomi’s mother, aged
ninety-one. The captain paid like a man for doctor and burial fees; he
undertook also to send the old lady a pound of snuff to assist her to a
last sneeze or two on the right side of the grave, and he kept his
word; for, deeming it necessary to paint her in a characteristic, these
prodigious serpents told him gravely that she delighted in snuff; it
was almost the only thing that kept her alive, barring a sip of broth.
Captain William’s comment on the interesting piece of longevity
whose well-covered length and framework lay exposed to his respectful
contemplation, was, that she must have been a devilish fine old lady in
her day. ‘Six foot’ was given as her measurement.

One pound of snuff, a bottle of rum, and five sovereigns were the fruits
of the captain’s sensibility. I shattered my ribs with laughter over the
story. Eveleen dwelt on the triumph, twinkling. Kiomi despised laughter
or triumph resulting from the natural exercise of craft in an emergency.
‘But my handsome gentleman he won’t tell on us, will he, when we’ve
nursed him and doctored him, and made him one of us, and as good a stick
o’ timber as grows in the forest?’ whined the old mother. I had to swear
I would not.

‘He!’ cried Kiomi.

‘He may forget us when he’s gone,’ the mother said. She would have liked
me to kiss a book to seal the oath. Anxiety about the safety of their
‘homes,’ that is, the assurance of an untroubled reception upon
their customary camping-ground, is a peculiarity of the gipsies,
distinguishing them, equally with their cleanliness and thriftiness,
from mumpers and the common wanderers.

It is their tribute to civilization, which generally keeps them within
the laws.

Who that does not know them will believe that under their domestic
system I had the best broth and the best tea I have ever tasted! They
are very cunning brewers and sagacious buyers too; their maxims show
them to direct all their acuteness upon obtaining quality for their
money. A compliment not backed by silver is hardly intelligible to the
pretty ones: money is a really credible thing to them; and when they
have it, they know how to use it. Apparently because they know so
well, so perfectly appreciating it, they have only vague ideas of a
corresponding sentiment on the opposite side to the bargain, and imagine
that they fool people much more often than they succeed in doing. Once
duped themselves, they are the wariest of the dog-burnt; the place is
notched where it occurred, and for ever avoided. On the other hand, they
repose implicit faith in a reputation vouched for by their experience.
I was amused by the girl Eveleen’s dotting of houses over the breadth of
five counties, where for this and that article of apparel she designed
to expend portions of a golden guinea, confident that she would get the
very best, and a shilling besides. The unwonted coin gave her the joy of
supposing she cheated the Mint of that sum. This guinea was a present to
the girl (to whom I owed my thrashing, by the way) that excused itself
under cover of being a bribe for sight of a mirror interdicted by the
implacable Kiomi. I wanted to have a look at my face. Now that the
familiar scenes were beginning to wear their original features to me, my
dread of personal hideousness was distressing, though Eveleen declared
the bad blood in my cheeks and eyes ‘had been sucked by pounds of red
meat.’ I wondered, whether if I stood up and walked to either one of
the three great halls lying in an obtuse triangle within view, I should
easily be recognized. When I did see myself, I groaned verily. With the
silence of profound resignation, I handed back to Eveleen the curious
fragment of her boudoir, which would have grimaced at Helen of Troy.

‘You’re feeling your nose--you’ve been looking at a glass!’ Kiomi said,
with supernatural swiftness of deduction on her return.

She added for my comfort that nothing was broken, but confessed me to
be still ‘a sight’; and thereupon drove knotty language at Eveleen. The
girl retorted, and though these two would never acknowledge to me that
any of their men had been in this neighbourhood recently, the fact was
treated as a matter of course in their spiteful altercation, and each
saddled the other with the mistake they had committed. Eveleen snatched
the last word. What she said I did not comprehend, she must have hit
hard. Kiomi’s eyes lightened, and her lips twitched; she coloured like
the roofing smoke of the tent fire; twice she showed her teeth, as in a
spasm, struck to the heart, unable to speak, breathing in and out of a
bitterly disjoined mouth. Eveleen ran. I guessed at the ill-word spoken.
Kiomi sat eyeing the wood-ashes, a devouring gaze that shot straight and
read but one thing. They who have seen wild creatures die will have her
before them, saving the fiery eyes. She became an ashen-colour, I took
her little hand. Unconscious of me, her brown fingers clutching at mine,
she flung up her nostrils, craving air.

This was the picture of the woman who could not weep in her misery.

‘Kiomi, old friend!’ I called to her. I could have cursed that other
friend, the son of mischief; for she, I could have sworn, had been
fiercely and wantonly hunted. Chastity of nature, intense personal
pride, were as proper to her as the free winds are to the heaths: they
were as visible to dull divination as the milky blue about the iris of
her eyeballs. She had actually no animal vileness, animal though she
might be termed, and would have appeared if compared with Heriot’s
admirable Cissies and Gwennies, and other ladies of the Graces that
run to fall, and spend their pains more in kindling the scent of the
huntsman than in effectively flying.

There was no consolation for her.

The girl Eveleen came in sight, loitering and looking, kicking her idle
heels.

Kiomi turned sharp round to me.

‘I’m going. Your father’s here, up at Bulsted. I’ll see him. He won’t
tell. He’ll come soon. You’ll be fit to walk in a day. You’re sound as a
nail. Goodbye--I shan’t say good-bye twice,’ she answered my attempt
to keep her, and passed into the tent, out of which she brought a small
bundle tied in a yellow handkerchief, and walked away, without nodding
or speaking.

‘What was that you said to Kiomi?’ I questioned Eveleen, who was quickly
beside me.

She replied, accurately or not: ‘I told her our men’d give her as good
as she gave me, let her wait and see.’

Therewith she pouted; or, to sketch her with precision, ‘snouted’ would
better convey the vivacity of her ugly flash of features. It was
an error in me to think her heartless. She talked of her aunt Kiomi
affectionately, for a gipsy girl, whose modulated tones are all
addressed to the soft public. Eveleen spoke with the pride of bated
breath of the ferocious unforgivingness of their men. Perhaps if she
had known that I traced the good repute of the tribes for purity to
the sweeter instincts of the women, she would have eulogized her sex to
amuse me. Gipsy girls, like other people, are fond of showing off; but
it would have been a victory of education to have helped her to feel the
distinction of the feminine sense of shame half as awfully and warmly as
she did the inscrutable iron despotism of the males. She hinted that the
mistake of which I had been the victim would be rectified.

‘Tell your men I’ll hunt them down like rats if I hear of it,’ said I.

While we were conversing my father arrived. Eveleen, not knowing him,
would have had me accept the friendly covering of a mat.

‘Here ‘s a big one! he’s a clergyman,’ she muttered to herself, and ran
to him and set up a gipsy whine, fronting me up to the last step while
she advanced; she only yielded ground to my outcry.

My father bent over me. Kiomi had prepared him for what he saw. I
quieted his alarm by talking currently and easily. Julia Bulsted had
despatched a messenger to inform him of my mysterious disappearance; but
he, as his way was, revelling in large conjectures, had half imagined
me seized by a gust of passion, and bound for Germany. ‘Without my
luggage?’ I laughed.

‘Ay, without your luggage, Richie,’ he answered seriously. His conceit
of a better knowledge of me than others possessed, had buoyed him
up. ‘For I knew,’ he said, ‘we two do nothing like the herd of men. I
thought you were off to her, my boy. Now!’ he looked at me, and this
look of dismay was a perfect mirror. I was not a presentable object.

He stretched his limbs on the heather and kept hold of my hand, looking
and talking watchfully, doctor-like, doubting me to be as sound in body
as I assured him I was, despite aches and pains. Eveleen hung near.

‘These people have been kind to you?’ he said.

‘No, the biggest brutes on the earth,’ said I.

‘Oh! you say that, when I spotted you out in the dark where you might
have lied to be eaten, and carried you and washed your bloody face,
and watched you, and never slept, I didn’t, to mother you and wet your
head!’ cried the girl.

My father beckoned to her and thanked her appreciably in the yellow
tongue.

‘So these scoundrels of the high road fell upon you and robbed you,
Richie?’

I nodded.

‘You let him think they robbed you, and you had your purse to give me a
gold guinea out of it!’ Eveleen cried, and finding herself in the wrong
track, volubly resumed: ‘That they didn’t, for they hadn’t time, whether
they meant to, and the night black as a coal, whoever they were.’

The mystery of my not having sent word to Bulsted or to Riversley
perplexed my father.

‘Comfortable here!’ he echoed me, disconsolately, and glanced at the
heath, the tent, the black circle of the broth-pot, and the wild girl.



CHAPTER XLVII. MY FATHER ACTS THE CHARMER AGAIN

Kiomi’s mother was seen in a turn of the gravel-cutting, bearing
purchases from Durstan village. She took the new circumstances in with
a single cast up of her wary eyelids; and her, and her skill in surgery
and art in medicine, I praised to lull her fears, which procured me the
denomination of old friend, as well as handsome gentleman: she went so
far as to add, in a fit of natural warmth, nice fellow; and it is the
truth, that this term effected wonders in flattering me: it seemed to
reveal to me how simple it was for Harry Richmond, one whom gipsies
could think a nice fellow, to be the lord of Janet’s affections--to be
her husband. My heart throbbed; yet she was within range of a mile and
a half, and I did not wish to be taken to her. I did wish to smell the
piney air about the lake-palace; but the thought of Ottilia caused me no
quick pulsations.

My father remained an hour. He could not perceive the drift of my
objection to go either to Bulsted or to Riversley, and desire that my
misadventure should be unknown at those places. However, he obeyed
me, as I could always trust him to do scrupulously, and told a tale at
Bulsted. In the afternoon he returned in a carriage to convey me to the
seaside. When I was raised I fainted, and saw the last of the camp on
Durstan much as I had come to it first. Sickness and swimming of the
head continued for several days. I was persecuted with the sensation
of the carriage journey, and an iteration of my father’s that ran: ‘My
son’s inanimate body in my arms,’ or ‘Clasping the lifeless body of my
sole son, Harry Richmond,’ and other variations. I said nothing about
it. He told me aghast that I had spat blood. A battery of eight fists,
having it in the end all its own way, leaves a deeper indentation on
its target than a pistol-shot that passes free of the vital chords. My
convalescence in Germany was a melody compared with this. I ought to
have stopped in the tent, according to the wise old mother’s advice,
given sincerely, for prudence counselled her to strike her canvas and be
gone. There I should have lain, interested in the progress of a bee, the
course of a beetle or a cloud, a spider’s business, and the shaking
of the gorse and the heather, until good health had grown out of
thoughtlessness. The very sight of my father was as a hive of humming
troubles.

His intense anxiety about me reflected in my mind the endless worry I
had concerning him. It was the intellect which condemned him when he
wore a joyful air, and the sensations when he waxed over-solicitous.
Whether or not the sentences were just, the judges should have sometimes
shifted places. I was unable to divine why he fevered me so much. Must I
say it?--He had ceased to entertain me. Instead of a comic I found him
a tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting
hopes that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their
predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses,
and exclamation of ‘Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and
well!’--assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way
of our contentment--were examples of downright unreason such as
contemplation through the comic glass would have excused; the tragic
could not. I knew, nevertheless, that to the rest of the world he was a
progressive comedy: and the knowledge made him seem more tragic still.
He clearly could not learn from misfortune; he was not to be contained.
Money I gave him freely, holding the money at my disposal his own; I
chafed at his unteachable spirit, surely one of the most tragical things
in life; and the proof of my love for him was that I thought it so,
though I should have been kinder had he amused me, as in the old days.

Conceive to yourself the keeping watch over a fountain choked in its
spouting, incessantly labouring to spin a jet into the air; now for a
moment glittering and towering in a column, and once more straining to
mount. My father appeared to me in that and other images. He would
have had me believe him shooting to his zenith, victorious at last. I
likewise was to reap a victory of the highest kind from the attack of
the mysterious ruffians; so much; he said, he thought he could assure
me of. He chattered of an intimidated Government, and Dettermain and
Newson; duchesses, dukes, most friendly; innumerable invitations to
country castles; and among other things one which really showed him to
be capable of conceiving ideas and working from an initiative. But this,
too, though it accomplished a temporary service, he rendered illusory
to me by his unhappy manner of regarding it as an instance of his now
permanent social authority. He had instituted what he called his JURY OF
HONOUR COURT, composed of the select gentlemen of the realm, ostensibly
to weigh the causes of disputes between members of their class, and
decree the method of settlement: but actually, my father admitted, to
put a stop to the affair between Edbury and me.

‘That was the origin of the notion, Richie. I carried it on. I dined
some of the best men of our day. I seized the opportunity when our
choicest “emperor” was rolling on wheels to propound my system. I
mention the names of Bramham DeWitt, Colonel Hibbert Segrave, Lord
Alonzo Carr, Admiral Loftus, the Earl of Luton, the Marquis of
Hatchford, Jack Hippony, Monterez Williams,--I think you know him?--and
little Dick Phillimore, son of a big-wig, a fellow of a capital wit
and discretion; I mention them as present to convince you we are not
triflers, dear boy. My argument ran, it is absurd to fight; also it is
intolerable to be compelled to submit to insult. As the case stands, we
are under a summary edict of the citizens, to whom chivalry is unknown.
Well, well, I delivered a short speech. Fighting, I said, resembled
butting,--a performance proper to creatures that grow horns instead
of brains.. not to allude to a multitude of telling remarks; and the
question “Is man a fighting animal?” my answer being that he is not born
with spurs on his heels or horns to his head and that those who insisted
on fighting should be examined by competent anatomists, “ologists” of
some sort, to decide whether they have the excrescences, and proclaim
them... touching on these lighter parts of my theme with extreme
delicacy. But--and here I dwelt on my point: Man, if not a fighting
animal in his glorious--I forgot what--is a sensitive one, and has the
idea of honour. “Hear,” from Colonel Segrave, and Sir Weeton Slaterhe
was one of the party. In fine, Richie, I found myself wafted into a
breathing oration. I cannot, I confess it humbly, hear your “hear,
hear,” without going up and off, inflated like a balloon. “Shall the
arbitration of the magistracy, indemnifications in money awarded by the
Law-courts, succeed in satisfying,”--but I declare to you, Richie, it
was no platform speech. I know your term--“the chaincable sentence.”
 Nothing of the kind, I assure you. Plain sense, as from gentlemen to
gentlemen. We require, I said, a protection that the polite world of
Great Britain does not now afford us against the aggressions of the
knave, the fool, and the brute. We establish a Court. We do hereby--no,
no, not the “hereby”; quite simply, Richie--pledge ourselves--I said
some other word not “pledge” to use our utmost authority and influence
to exclude from our circles persons refusing to make the reparation of
an apology for wanton common insults: we renounce intercourse with
men declining, when guilty of provoking the sentiment of hostility, to
submit to the jurisdiction of our Court. All I want you to see is the
notion. We raise the shield against the cowardly bully which the laws
have raised against the bloody one. “And gentlemen,”’ my father resumed
his oration, forgetting my sober eye for a minute--‘“Gentlemen, we
are the ultimate Court of Appeal for men who cherish their honour,
yet abstain from fastening it like a millstone round the neck of their
common-sense.” Credit me, Richie, the proposition kindled. We cited Lord
Edbury to appear before us, and I tell you we extracted an ample apology
to you from that young nobleman. And let me add, one that I, that we,
must impose it upon an old son to accept. He does! Come, come. And you
shall see, Richie, society shall never repose an inert mass under my
leadership. I cure it; I shake it and cure it.’

He promenaded the room, repeating: ‘I do not say I am possessed of a
panacea,’ and bending to my chin as he passed; ‘I maintain that I can
and do fulfil the duties of my station, which is my element, attained
in the teeth of considerable difficulties, as no other man could, be he
prince or Prime Minister. Not one,’ he flourished, stepping onward. ‘And
mind you, Richie, this,’ he swung round, conscious as ever of the
critic in me, though witless to correct his pomp of style, ‘this is
not self-glorification. I point you facts. I have a thousand
schemes--projects. I recognize the value of early misfortune. The
particular misfortune of princes born is that they know nothing of
the world--babies! I grant you, babies. Now, I do. I have it on my
thumbnail. I know its wants. And just as I succeeded in making you a
member of our Parliament in assembly, and the husband of an hereditary
princess--hear me--so will I make good my original determination to be
in myself the fountain of our social laws, and leader. I have never,
I believe--to speak conscientiously--failed in a thing I have once
determined on.’

The single wish that I might be a boy again, to find pleasure in his
talk, was all that remained to combat the distaste I had for such
oppressive deliveries of a mind apparently as little capable of being
seated as a bladder charged with gas. I thanked him for getting rid of
Edbury, and a touch of remorse pricked me, it is true, on his turning
abruptly and saying: ‘You see me in my nakedness, Richie. To you and my
valet, the heart, the body!’ He was too sympathetic not to have a keen
apprehension of a state of hostility in one whom he loved. If I had
inclined to melt, however, his next remark would have been enough to
harden me: ‘I have fought as many battles, and gained as startling
victories as Napoleon Buonaparte; he was an upstart.’ The word gave me a
jerk.

Sometimes he would indulge me transparently in a political controversy,
confessing that my dialectical dexterity went far to make a Radical of
him. I had no other amusement, or I should have held my peace. I tried
every argument I could think of to prove to him that there was neither
honour, nor dignity, nor profit in aiming at titular distinctions not
forced upon us by the circumstances of our birth. He kept his position
with much sly fencing, approaching shrewdness; and, whatever I might
say, I could not deny that a vile old knockknee’d world, tugging its
forelock to the look of rank and chink of wealth, backed him, if he
chose to be insensible to radical dignity.

‘In my time,’ said he, ‘all young gentlemen were born Tories. The doctor
no more expected to see a Radical come into the world from a good family
than a radish. But I discern you, my dear boy. Our reigning Families
must now be active; they require the discipline I have undergone; and
I also dine at aldermen’s tables, and lay a foundation-stone--as Jorian
says--with the facility of a hen-mother: that should not suffice them.
‘Tis not sufficient for me. I lay my stone, eat my dinner, make my
complimentary speech--and that is all that is expected of us; but I am
fully aware we should do more. We must lead, or we are lost. Ay, and--to
quote you a Lord Mayor’s barge is a pretty piece of gilt for the festive
and luxurious to run up the river Thames in and mark their swans. I am
convinced there is something deep in that. But what am I to do? Would
you have me frown upon the people? Richie, it is prudent--I maintain
it righteous, nay, it is, I affirm positively, sovereign wisdom--to
cultivate every flower in the British bosom. Riposte me--have you too
many? Say yes, and you pass my guard. You cannot. I fence you there.
This British loyalty is, in my estimation, absolutely beautiful. We
grow to a head in our old England. The people have an eye! I need no
introduction to them. We reciprocate a highly cordial feeling when
they line the streets and roads with respectful salutations, and I
acknowledge their demonstrative goodwill. These things make us a nation.
By heaven, Richie, you are, on this occasion, if your dad may tell you
so, wrong. I ask pardon for my bluntness; but I put it to you, could
we, not travelling as personages in our well-beloved country, count on
civility to greet us everywhere? Assuredly not. My position is, that by
consenting to their honest enthusiasm, we the identical effect you
are perpetually crying out for--we civilize them, we civilize them.
Goodness!--a Great Britain without Royalty!’

He launched on a series of desolate images. In the end, he at least
persuaded himself that he had an idea in his anxiety to cultivate the
primary British sentiment.

We moved from town to town along the South coast; but it was vain to
hope we might be taken for simple people. Nor was he altogether to
blame, except in allowing the national instinct for ‘worship and
reverence’ to air itself unrebuked. I fled to the island. Temple ran
down to meet me there, and I heard that Janet had written to him for
news of me. He entered our hotel a private person; when he passed out,
hats flew off before him. The modest little fellow went along a double
line of attentive observers on the pier, and came back, asking me in
astonishment who he was supposed to be.

‘I petitioned for privacy here!’ exclaimed my father. It accounted for
the mystery.

Temple knew my feelings, and did but glance at me.

Close upon Temple’s arrival we had a strange couple of visitors.
‘Mistress Dolly Disher and her husband,’ my father introduced them. She
called him by one of his Christian names inadvertently at times. The
husband was a confectioner, a satisfied shade of a man who reserved
the exercise of his will for his business, we learnt; she, a bustling,
fresh-faced woman of forty-five, with still expressive dark eyes, and, I
guessed, the ideal remainder of a passion in her bosom. The guess was no
great hazard. She was soon sitting beside me, telling me of the ‘years’
she had known my father, and of the most affectionate friend and perfect
gentleman he was of the ladies who had been in love with him; ‘no
wonder’: and of his sorrows and struggles, and his beautiful voice, and
hearts that bled for him; and of one at least who prayed and trusted he
would be successful at last.

Temple and the pallid confectioner spent the day on board a yacht with
my father. Mrs. Dolly stayed to nurse me and persuade me to swallow
medicine. She talked of her youth, when, as a fashionable bootmaker’s
daughter, she permitted no bills to be sent in to Mr. Richmond,
alleging, as a sufficient reason for it to her father, that their family
came from Richmond in Yorkshire. Eventually, the bills were always paid.
She had not been able to manage her husband so well; and the consequence
was, that (she breathed low) an execution was out; ‘though I tell him,’
she said tremulously, ‘he ‘s sure to be paid in the long run, if
only he’ll wait. But no; he is you cannot think how obstinate in his
business. And my girl Augusta waiting for Mr. Roy Richmond, the wish
of our hearts! to assist at her wedding; and can we ask it, and have an
execution hanging over him? And for all my husband’s a guest here, he’s
as likely as not to set the officers at work, do what I will, to-morrow
or any day. Your father invited us, Mr. Harry. I forced my husband to
come, hoping against hope; for your papa gave the orders, relying on me,
as he believed he might, and my husband undertook them, all through me.
There it stops; he hears reports, and he takes fright: in goes the bill:
then it’s law, and last Oh! I’m ashamed.’

Mr. Disher’s bill was for supplying suppers to the Balls. He received my
cheque for the amount in full, observing that he had been confident
his wife was correct when she said it would be paid, but a tradesman’s
business was to hasten the day of payment; and, for a penance, he
himself would pacify the lawyers.

On hearing of the settlement of Mr. Disher’s claim, my father ahem’d,
speechless, which was a sign of his swallowing vexation. He remarked
that I had, no doubt with the best intentions, encroached on his
liberty. ‘I do not like to have my debts disturbed.’ He put it to me,
whether a man, carrying out a life-long plan, would not be disconcerted
by the friendliest intervention. This payment to Disher he pronounced
fatal in policy. ‘You have struck a heavy blow to my credit, Richie.
Good little Mistress Dolly brought the man down here--no select addition
to our society--and we were doing our utmost to endure him, as the
ladies say, for the very purpose... but the error stands committed! For
the future, friend Disher will infallibly expect payments within the
year. Credit for suppers is the guarantee of unlimited entertainments.
And I was inspiring him with absolute confidence for next year’s
campaign. Money, you are aware, is no longer a question to terrify me. I
hold proofs that I have conclusively frightened Government, and you know
it. But this regards the manipulation of the man Disher. He will now
dictate to me. A refresher of a few hundreds would have been impolitic
to this kind of man; but the entire sum! and to a creditor in arms! You
reverse the proper situations of gentleman and tradesman. My supperman,
in particular, should be taught to understand that he is bound up in my
success. Something frightened him; he proceeded at law; and now we have
shown him that he has frightened us. An execution? My dear boy, I have
danced an execution five years running, and ordered, consecutively, at
the same house. Like other matters, an execution depends upon how you
treat it. The odds are that we have mortally offended Mistress Dolly.’
He apologized for dwelling on the subject, with the plea that it was an
essential part of his machinery of action, and the usual comparison of
‘the sagacious General’ whose forethought omitted no minutiae. I had to
listen.

The lady professed to be hurt. The payment, however, put an end to the
visit of this couple. Politic or not, it was a large sum to disburse,
and once more my attention became fixed on the probable display of
figures in my bankers’ book. Bonds and bills were falling due: the
current expenses were exhausting. I tried to face the evil, and take
a line of conduct, staggering, as I did on my feet. Had I been well
enough, I believe I should have gone to my grandfather, to throw myself
on his good-nature; such was the brain’s wise counsel: but I was all
nerves and alarms, insomuch that I interdicted Temple’s writing to
Janet, lest it should bring on me letters from my aunt Dorothy, full of
advice that could no longer be followed, well-meant cautions that might
as well be addressed to the mile-posts behind me. Moreover, Janet would
be flying on the wind to me, and I had a craving for soft arms and the
look of her eyebrows, that warned me to keep her off if I intended to
act as became a man of good faith.

Fair weather, sunny green sea-water speckled with yachts shooting and
bounding, and sending me the sharp sense of life there is in dashed-up
fountains of silvery salt-spray, would have quickened my blood sooner
but for this hot-bed of fruitless adventure, tricksy precepts, and
wisdom turned imp, in which my father had again planted me. To pity him
seemed a childish affectation. His praise of my good looks pleased me,
for on that point he was fitted to be a judge, and I was still fancying
I had lost them on the heath. Troops of the satellites of his grand
parade surrounded him. I saw him walk down the pier like one breaking up
a levee. At times he appeared to me a commanding phantasm in the midst
of phantasm figures of great ladies and their lords, whose names he told
off on his return like a drover counting his herd; but within range of
his eye and voice the reality of him grew overpowering. It seduced me,
and, despite reason, I began to feel warm under his compliments. He
was like wine. Gaiety sprang under his feet. Sitting at my window, I
thirsted to see him when he was out of sight, and had touches of the
passion of my boyhood.

I listened credulously, too, as in the old days, when he repeated, ‘You
will find I am a magician, and very soon, Richie, mark me.’ His manner
hinted that there was a surprise in store. ‘You have not been on
the brink of the grave for nothing.’ He resembled wine in the other
conditions attached to its rare qualities. Oh for the choice of having
only a little of him, instead of having him on my heart! The unfilial
wish attacked me frequently: he could be, and was, so ravishing to
strangers and light acquaintances. Did by chance a likeness exist
between us? My sick fancy rushed to the Belthams for a denial. There
did, of some sort, I knew; and the thought partitioned my dreamy
ideas, of which the noblest, taking advantage of my physical weakness,
compelled me to confess that it was a vain delusion for one such as I
to hope for Ottilia. This looking at the roots of yourself, if you are
possessed of a nobler half that will do it, is a sound corrective of an
excessive ambition. Unfortunately it would seem that young men can do
it only in sickness. With the use of my legs, and open-air breathing, I
became compact, and as hungry and zealous on behalf of my individuality,
as proud of it as I had ever been: prouder and hungrier.

My first day of outing, when, looking at every face, I could reflect on
the miraculous issue of mine almost clear from its pummelling, and
above all, that my nose was safe--not stamped with the pugilist’s
brand--inspired a lyrical ebullition of gratitude. Who so intoxicated as
the convalescent catching at health?

I met Charles Etherell on the pier, and heard that my Parliamentary
seat was considered in peril, together with a deal of gossip about my
disappearance.

My father, who was growing markedly restless, on the watch for letters
and new arrivals, started to pay Chippenden a flying visit. He begged me
urgently to remain for another few days, while he gathered information,
saying my presence at his chief quarters did him infinite service, and
I always thought that possible. I should find he was a magician, he
repeated, with a sort of hesitating fervour.

I had just waved my hand to him as the boat was bearing him away from
the pier-head, when a feminine voice murmured in my ear, ‘Is not this
our third meeting, Mr. Harry Richmond?--Venice, Elbestadt, and the Isle
of Wight?’ She ran on, allowing me time to recognize Clara Goodwin.
‘What was your last adventure? You have been ill. Very ill? Has it been
serious?’

I made light of it. ‘No: a tumble.’

‘You look pale,’ she said quickly.

‘That’s from grieving at the loss of my beauty, Miss Goodwin.’

‘Have you really not been seriously ill?’ she asked with an astonishing
eagerness.

I told her mock-loftily that I did not believe in serious illnesses
coming to godlike youth, and plied her in turn with inquiries.

‘You have not been laid up in bed?’ she persisted.

‘No, on my honour, not in bed.’

‘Then,’ said she, ‘I would give much to be able to stop that boat.’

She amazed me. ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s going on a bad errand,’ she replied.

‘Miss Goodwin, you perplex me. My father has started in that boat.’

‘Yes, I saw him.’ She glanced hastily at the foam in a way to show
indifference. ‘What I am saying concerns others... who have heard you
were dangerously ill. I have sent for them to hasten across.’

‘My aunt and Miss Ilchester?’

‘No.’

‘Who are they? Miss Goodwin, I’ll answer any question. I’ve been
queerish, that’s true. Now let me hear who they are, when you arrived,
when you expect them. Where are they now?’

‘As to me,’ she responded with what stretched on my ears like an
insufferable drawl, ‘I came over last night to hire a furnished house or
lodgings. Papa has an appointment attached to the fortifications yonder.
We’ll leave the pier, if you please. You draw too much attention on
ladies who venture to claim acquaintance with so important a gentleman.’

We walked the whole length of the pier, chatting of our former meetings.

‘Not here,’ she said, as soon as I began to question.

I was led farther on, half expecting that the accessories of time and
place would have to do with the revelation.

The bitter creature drew me at her heels into a linendraper’s shop.
There she took a seat, pitched her voice to the key of a lady’s at a
dinner-table, when speaking to her cavalier of the history or attire
of some one present, and said, ‘You are sure the illness was not at all
feigned?’

She had me as completely at her mercy in this detestable shop as if I
had been in a witness-box.

‘Feigned!’ I exclaimed.

‘That is no answer. And pray remember where you are.’

‘No, the illness was not feigned.’

‘And you have not made the most of it?’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’

‘That is no answer. And please do not imagine yourself under the
necessity of acting every sentiment of your heart before these people.’

She favoured a shopman with half-a-dozen directions.

‘My answer is, then, that I have not made the most of it,’ I said.

‘Not even by proxy?’

‘Once more I’m adrift.’

‘You are certainly energetic. I must address you as a brother, or it
will be supposed we are quarrelling. Harry, do you like that pattern?’

‘Yes. What’s the meaning of proxy?’

‘With the accent you give it, heaven only knows what it means. I
would rather you did not talk here like a Frenchman relating his last
love-affair in company.

Must your voice escape control exactly at the indicatory words? Do you
think your father made the most of it?’

‘Of my illness? Oh! yes; the utmost. I should undoubtedly think so.
That’s his way.’

‘Why did you permit it?’

‘I was what they call “wandering” half the time. Besides, who could keep
him in check? I rarely know what he is doing.’

‘You don’t know what he wrote?’

‘Wrote?’

‘That you were dying.’

‘Of me? To whom?’

She scrutinized me, and rose from her chair. ‘I must try some other
shop. How is it, that if these English people cannot make a “berthe”
 fit to wear, they do not conceive the idea of importing such things from
Paris? I will take your arm, Harry.’

‘You have bought nothing,’ I remarked.

‘I have as much as I went for,’ she replied, and gravely thanked
the assistant leaning on his thumbs across the counter; after which,
dropping the graceless play of an enigma, she inquired whether I had
forgotten the Frau von Dittmarsch.

I had, utterly; but not her maiden name of Sibley.

‘Miss Goodwin, is she one of those who are coming to the island?’

‘Frau von Dittmarsch? Yes. She takes an interest in you. She and I have
been in correspondence ever since my visit to Sarkeld. It reminds me,
you may vary my maiden name with the Christian, if you like. Harry, I
believe you are truthful as ever, in spite--’

‘Don’t be unjust,’ said I.

‘I wish I could think I was!’ she rejoined. ‘Frau von Dittmarsch was
at Sarkeld, and received terrible news of you. She called on me, at my
father’s residence over the water yonder, yesterday afternoon,
desiring greatly to know--she is as cautious as one with a jewel in her
custody--how it fared with you, whether you were actually in a dying
state. I came here to learn; I have friends here: you were not alone, or
I should have called on you. The rumour was that you were very ill; so I
hired a furnished place for Frau von Dittmarsch at once. But when I
saw you and him together, and the parting between you, I began to have
fears; I should have countermanded the despatch I sent by the boat, had
it been possible.’

‘It has gone! And tell me the name of the other.’

‘Frau von Dittmarsch has a husband.’

‘Not with her now. Oh! cruel! speak: her name?’

‘Her name, Harry?’ Her title is Countess von Delzenburg.’

‘Not princess?’

‘Not in England.’

Then Ottilia was here!

My father was indeed a magician!



CHAPTER XLVIII. THE PRINCESS ENTRAPPED

‘Not princess in England,’ could betoken but one thing--an incredible
act of devotion, so great that it stunned my senses, and I thought of
it, and of all it involved, before the vision of Ottilia crossing seas
took possession of me.

‘The Princess Ottilia, Miss Goodwin?’

‘The Countess of Delzenburg, Harry.’

‘To see me? She has come!’

‘Harry, you talk like the boy you were when we met before you knew her.
Yes and yes to everything you have to say, but I think you should spare
her name.’

‘She comes thinking me ill?’

‘Dying.’

‘I’m as strong as ever I was.’

‘I should imagine you are, only rather pale.’

‘Have you, tell me, Clara, seen her yourself? Is she well?’

‘Pale: not unwell: anxious.’

‘About me?’

‘It may be about the political affairs of the Continent; they are
disturbed.’

‘She spoke of me?’

‘Yes.’

‘She is coming by the next boat?’

‘It’s my fear that she is.’

‘Why do you fear?’

‘Shall I answer you, Harry? It is useless now. Well, because she has
been deceived. That is why. You will soon find it out.’

‘Prince Ernest is at Sarkeld?’

‘In Paris, I hear.’

‘How will your despatch reach these ladies in time for them to come over
by the next boat?’

‘I have sent my father’s servant. The General--he is promoted at last,
Harry--attends the ladies in person, and is now waiting for the boat’s
arrival over there, to follow my directions.’

‘You won’t leave me?’

Miss Goodwin had promised to meet the foreign ladies on the pier. We
quarrelled and made it up a dozen times like girl and boy, I calling
her aunt Clara, as in the old days, and she calling me occasionally
son Richie: an imitation of my father’s manner of speech to me when we
formed acquaintance first in Venice. But I was very little aware of what
I was saying or doing. The forces of my life were yoked to the heart,
and tumbled as confusedly as the world under Phaethon charioteer. We
walked on the heights above the town. I looked over the water to the
white line of shore and batteries where this wonder stood, who was what
poets dream of, deep-hearted men hope for, none quite believe in.
Hardly could I; and though my relenting spinster friend at my elbow kept
assuring me it was true that she was there, my sceptical sight fixed on
the stale prominences visible in the same features which they had worn
day after empty day of late. This deed of hers was an act of devotion
great as death. I knew it from experience consonant to Ottilia’s
character; but could a princess, hereditary, and bound in the league
of governing princes, dare so to brave her condition? Complex of mind,
simplest in character, the uncontrollable nobility of her spirit was no
sooner recognized by me than I was shocked throughout by a sudden light,
contrasting me appallingly with this supreme of women, who swept the
earth aside for truth. I had never before received a distinct intimation
of my littleness of nature, and my first impulse was to fly from
thought, and then, as if to prove myself justly accused, I caught myself
regretting--no, not regretting, gazing, as it were, on a picture of
regrets--that Ottilia was not a romantic little lady of semi-celestial
rank, exquisitely rash, wilful, desperately enamoured, bearing as many
flying hues and peeps of fancy as a love-ballad, and not more roughly
brushing the root-emotions.

If she had but been such an one, what sprightly colours, delicious
sadness, magical transformations, tenderest intermixture of earth and
heaven; what tears and sunbeams, divinest pathos: what descents from
radiance to consolatory twilight, would have surrounded me for poetry
and pride to dwell on! What captivating melody in the minor key would
have been mine, though I lost her--the legacy of it all for ever! Say a
petulant princess, a star of beauty, mad for me, and the whisper of our
passion and sorrows traversing the flushed world! Was she coming? Not
she, but a touchstone, a relentless mirror, a piercing eye, a mind
severe as the Goddess of the God’s head: a princess indeed, but
essentially a princess above women: a remorseless intellect, an actual
soul visible in the flesh. She was truth. Was I true? Not so very false,
yet how far from truth! The stains on me (a modern man writing his
history is fugitive and crepuscular in alluding to them, as a woman
kneeling at the ear-guichet) burnt like the blood-spots on the criminal
compelled to touch his victim by savage ordinance, which knew the savage
and how to search him. And these were faults of weakness rather than
the sins of strength. I might as fairly hope for absolution of them from
Ottilia as from offended laws of my natural being, gentle though she
was, and charitable.

Was I not guilty of letting her come on to me hoodwinked at this
moment? I had a faint memory of Miss Goodwin’s saying that she had been
deceived, and I suggested a plan of holding aloof until she had warned
the princess of my perfect recovery, to leave it at her option to see
me.

‘Yes,’ Miss Goodwin assented: ‘if you like, Harry.’

Her compassion for me only tentatively encouraged the idea. ‘It would,
perhaps, be right. You are the judge. If you can do it. You are acting
bravely.’ She must have laughed at me in her heart.

The hours wore on. My curse of introspection left me, and descending
through the town to the pier, amid the breezy blue skirts and
bonnet-strings, we watched the packet-boat approaching. There was in
advance one of the famous swift island wherries. Something went wrong
with it, for it was overtaken, and the steamer came in first. I jumped
on board, much bawled at. Out of a crowd of unknown visages, Janet
appeared: my aunt Dorothy was near her. The pair began chattering of my
paleness, and wickedness in keeping my illness unknown to them. They had
seen Temple on an excursion to London; he had betrayed me, as he would
have betrayed an archangel to Janet.

‘Will you not look at us, Harry?’ they both said.

The passengers were quitting the boat, strangers every one.

‘Harry, have we really offended you in coming?’ said Janet.

My aunt Dorothy took the blame on herself.

I scarcely noticed them, beyond leading them on to the pier-steps
and leaving them under charge of Miss Goodwin, who had, in matters of
luggage and porterage, the practical mind and aplomb of an Englishwoman
that has passed much of her time on the Continent. I fancied myself
vilely duped by this lady. The boat was empty of its passengers; a
grumbling pier-man, wounded in his dignity, notified to me that there
were fines for disregard of the Company’s rules and regulations. His
tone altered; he touched his hat: ‘Didn’t know who you was, my lord.’
Janet overheard him, and her face was humorous.

‘We may break the rules, you see,’ I said to her.

‘We saw him landing on the other side of the water,’ she replied; so
spontaneously did the circumstance turn her thoughts on my father.

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No.’

‘You avoided him?’

‘Aunty and I thought it best. He landed... there was a crowd.’

Miss Goodwin interposed: ‘You go to Harry’s hotel?’

‘Grandada is coming down to-morrow or next day,’ Janet prompted my aunt
Dorothy.

‘If we could seek for a furnished house; Uberly would watch the
luggage,’ Dorothy murmured in distress.

‘Furnished houses, even rooms at hotels, are doubtful in the height
of the season,’ Miss Goodwin remarked. ‘Last night I engaged the only
decent set of rooms I could get, for friends of Harry’s who are coming.’

‘No wonder he was disappointed at seeing us--he was expecting them!’
said Janet, smiling a little.

‘They are sure to come,’ said Miss Goodwin.

Near us a couple of yachtsmen were conversing.

‘Oh, he’ll be back in a day or two,’ one said. ‘When you ‘ve once
tasted that old boy, you can’t do without him. I remember when I was a
youngster--it was in Lady Betty Bolton’s day; she married old Edbury,
you know, first wife--the Magnificent was then in his prime. He spent
his money in a week: so he hired an eighty-ton schooner; he laid violent
hands on a Jew, bagged him, lugged him on board, and sailed away.’

‘What the deuce did he want with a Jew?’ cried the other.

‘Oh, the Jew supplied cheques for a three months’ cruise in the
Mediterranean, and came home, I heard, very good friends with his
pirate. That’s only one of dozens.’

The unconscious slaughterers laughed.

‘On another occasion’--I heard it said by the first speaker, as they
swung round to parade the pier, and passed on narrating.

‘Not an hotel, if it is possible to avoid it,’ my aunt Dorothy, with
heightened colour, urged Miss Goodwin. They talked together.

‘Grandada is coming to you, Harry,’ Janet said. ‘He has business in
London, or he would have been here now. Our horses and carriages follow
us: everything you would like. He does love you! he is very anxious.
I’m afraid his health is worse than he thinks. Temple did not say your
father was here, but grandada must have suspected it when he consented
to our coming, and said he would follow us. So that looks well perhaps.
He has been much quieter since your money was paid back to you. If they
should meet... no, I hope they will not: grandada hates noise. And,
Harry, let me tell you: it may be nothing: if he questions you, do not
take fire; just answer plainly: I’m sure you understand. One in a temper
at a time I’m sure ‘s enough: you have only to be patient with him. He
has been going to London, to the City, seeing lawyers, bankers, brokers,
and coming back muttering. Ah! dear old man. And when he ought to have
peace! Harry, the poor will regret him in a thousand places. I write a
great deal for him now, and I know how they will. What are you looking
at?’

I was looking at a man of huge stature, of the stiffest build, whose
shoulders showed me their full breadth while he stood displaying
frontwards the open of his hand in a salute.

‘Schwartz!’ I called. Janet started, imagining some fierce interjection.
The giant did not stir.

But others had heard. A lady stepped forward. ‘Dear Mr. Harry Richmond!
Then you are better? We had most alarming news of you.’

I bowed to the Frau von Dittmarsch, anciently Miss Sibley.

‘The princess?’

‘She is here.’

Frau von Dittmarsch clasped Miss Goodwin’s hand. I was touching
Ottilia’s. A veil partly swathed her face. She trembled: the breeze
robbed me of her voice.

Our walk down the pier was almost in silence. Miss Goodwin assumed the
guardianship of the foreign ladies. I had to break from them and provide
for my aunt Dorothy and Janet.

‘They went over in a little boat, they were so impatient. Who is she?’
Dorothy Beltham asked.

‘The Princess Ottilia,’ said Janet.

‘Are you certain? Is it really, Harry?’

I confirmed it, and my aunt said, ‘I should have guessed it could be no
other; she has a foreign grace.’

‘General Goodwin was with them when the boat came in from the island,’
said Janet. ‘He walked up to Harry’s father, and you noticed, aunty,
that the ladies stood away, as if they wished to be unobserved, as we
did, and pulled down their veils. They would not wait for our boat. We
passed them crossing. People joked about the big servant over-weighing
the wherry.’

Dorothy Beltham thought the water too rough for little boats.

‘She knows what a sea is,’ I said.

Janet gazed steadily after the retreating figures, and then commended me
to the search for rooms. The end of it was that I abandoned my father’s
suite to them. An accommodating linen-draper possessed of a sea-view,
and rooms which hurled the tenant to the windows in desire for it, gave
me harbourage.

Till dusk I scoured the town to find Miss Goodwin, without whom there
was no clue to the habitation I was seeking, and I must have passed her
blindly again and again. My aunt Dorothy and Janet thanked me for my
consideration in sitting down to dine with them; they excused my haste
to retire. I heard no reproaches except on account of my not sending
them word of my illness. Janet was not warm. She changed in colour and
voice when I related what I had heard from Miss Goodwin, namely, that
‘some one’ had informed the princess I was in a dying state. I was
obliged to offer up my father as a shield for Ottilia, lest false ideas
should tarnish the image of her in their minds. Janet did not speak of
him. The thought stood in her eyes; and there lies the evil of a sore
subject among persons of one household: they have not to speak to
exhibit their minds.

After a night of suspense I fell upon old Schwartz and Aennchen out in
the earliest dawn, according to their German habits, to have a gaze
at sea, and strange country and people. Aennchen was all wonder at the
solitary place, Schwartz at the big ships. But when they tried to direct
me to the habitation of their mistress, it was discovered by them that
they had lost their bearings. Aennchen told me the margravine had been
summoned to Rippau just before they left Sarkeld. Her mistress had
informed Baroness Turckems of her intention to visit England. Prince
Ernest was travelling in France.

The hour which brought me to Ottilia was noon. The arrangements of the
ladies could only grant me thirty minutes, for Janet was to drive
the princess out into the country to view the island. She and my aunt
Dorothy had been already introduced. Miss Goodwin, after presenting
them, insisted upon ceremoniously accompanying me to the house. Quite
taking the vulgar view of a proceeding such as the princess had been
guilty of, and perhaps fearing summary audacity and interestedness in
the son of a father like mine, she ventured on lecturing me, as though
it lay with me to restrain the fair romantic head, forbear from calling
up my special advantages, advise, and stand to the wisdom of this world,
and be the man of honour. The princess had said: ‘Not see him when
I have come to him?’ I reassured my undiscerning friend partly, not
wholly.

‘Would it be commonly sensible or civil, to refuse to see me, having
come?’

Miss Goodwin doubted.

I could indicate forcibly, because I felt, the clear-judging brain and
tempered self-command whereby Ottilia had gained her decision.

Miss Goodwin nodded and gave me the still-born affirmative of
politeness. Her English mind expressed itself willing to have exonerated
the rash great lady for visiting a dying lover, but he was not the same
person now that he was on his feet, consequently her expedition wore a
different aspect:--my not dying condemned her. She entreated me to keep
the fact of the princess’s arrival unknown to my father, on which point
we were one. Intensely enthusiastic for the men of her race, she would
have me, above all things, by a form of adjuration designed to be a
masterpiece of persuasive rhetoric, ‘prove myself an Englishman.’ I was
to show that ‘the honour, interests, reputation and position of any lady
(demented or not,’ she added) ‘were as precious to me as to the owner’:
that ‘no woman was ever in peril of a shadow of loss in the hands of an
English gentleman,’ and so forth, rather surprisingly to me,
remembering her off-hand manner of the foregoing day. But the sense of
responsibility thrown upon her ideas of our superior national dignity
had awakened her fervider naturalness--made her a different person, as
we say when accounting, in our fashion, for what a little added heat may
do.

The half hour allotted to me fled. I went from the room and the house,
feeling that I had seen and heard her who was barely of the world of
humankind for me, so strongly did imagination fly with her. I kissed her
fingers, I gazed in her eyes, I heard the beloved voice. All passed too
swift for happiness. Recollections set me throbbing, but recollection
brought longing. She said, ‘Now I have come I must see you, Harry.’
Did it signify that to see me was a piece of kindness at war with her
judgement? She rejoiced at my perfect recovery, though it robbed her of
the plea in extenuation of this step she had taken. She praised me
for abstaining to write to her, when I was stammering a set of
hastily-impressed reasons to excuse myself for the omission. She praised
my step into Parliament. It did not seem to involve a nearer approach to
her. She said, ‘You have not wasted your time in England.’ It was for my
solitary interests that she cared, then.

I brooded desperately. I could conceive an overlooking height that made
her utterance simple and consecutive: I could not reach it. Topics
which to me were palpitating, had no terror for her. She said, ‘I have
offended my father; I have written to him; he will take me away.’ In
speaking of the letter which had caused her to offend, she did not blame
the writer. I was suffered to run my eyes over it, and was ashamed.
It read to me too palpably as an outcry to delude and draw her
hither:--pathos and pathos: the father holding his dying son in his
arms, his sole son, Harry Richmond; the son set upon by enemies in the
night: the lover never daring to beg for a sight of his beloved ere he
passed away:--not an ill-worded letter; read uncritically, it may have
been touching: it must have been, though it was the reverse for me. I
frowned, broke down in regrets, under sharp humiliation.

She said, ‘You knew nothing of it. A little transgression is the real
offender. When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in
danger of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcasts.’
That meant, ‘My turning aside to you originally was the blameable
thing.’ It might mean, ‘My love of you sets my ideas of duty at variance
with my father’s.’

She smiled; nothing was uttered in a tone of despondency. Her high
courage and breeding gave her even in this pitfall the smoothness which
most women keep for society. Why she had not sent me any message or
tidings of herself to Riversley was not a matter that she could imagine
to perplex me: she could not imagine my losing faith in her. The least
we could do, I construed it, the religious bond between us was a faith
in one another that should sanctify to our souls the external injuries
it caused us to commit. But she talked in no such strain. Her delight in
treading English ground was her happy theme. She said, ‘It is as young
as when we met in the forest’; namely, the feeling revived for England.
How far off we were from the green Devonshire coast, was one of her
questions, suggestive of our old yacht-voyage lying among her dreams.
Excepting an extreme and terrorizing paleness, there was little to fever
me with the thought that she suffered mortally. Of reproach, not a word;
nor of regret. At the first touch of hands, when we stood together,
alone, she said, ‘Would hearing of your recovery have given me peace?’
My privileges were the touch of hands, the touch of her fingers to my
lips, a painless hearing and seeing, and passionate recollection. She
said, ‘Impatience is not for us, Harry’: I was not to see her again
before the evening. These were the last words she said, and seemed
the lightest until my hot brain made a harvest of them transcending
thrice-told vows of love. Did they not mean, ‘We two wait’: therefore,
‘The years are bondmen to our stedfastness.’ Could sweeter have been
said? They might mean nothing!

She was veiled when Janet drove her out; Janet sitting upright in
her masterly way, smoothing her pet ponies with the curl of her whip,
chatting and smiling; the princess slightly leaning back. I strode up to
the country roads, proud of our land’s beauty under a complacent sky.
By happy chance, which in a generous mood I ascribed to Janet’s good
nature, I came across them at a seven miles’ distance. They were talking
spiritedly: what was wonderful, they gave not much heed to me: they
seemed on edge for one another’s conversation: each face was turned
to the other’s, and after nodding an adieu, they resumed the animated
discourse. I had been rather in alarm lest Ottilia should think little
of Janet. They passed out of sight without recurring to a thought of me
behind them.

In the evening I was one among a group of ladies. I had the opportunity
of hearing the running interchange between Ottilia and Janet, which
appeared to be upon equal terms; indeed, Janet led. The subjects were
not very deep. Plain wits, candour, and an unpretending tongue, it
seemed, could make common subjects attractive, as fair weather does our
English woods and fields. The princess was attracted by something in
Janet. I myself felt the sway of something, while observing Ottilia’s
rapt pleasure in her talk and her laughter, with those funny familiar
frowns and current dimples twisting and melting away like a play of
shadows on the eddies of the brook.

‘I ‘m glad to be with her,’ Janet said of Ottilia.

It was just in that manner she spoke in Ottilia’s presence. Why it
should sound elsewhere unsatisfactorily blunt, and there possess a
finished charm, I could not understand.

I mentioned to Janet that I feared my father would be returning.

She contained herself with a bridled ‘Oh!’

We were of one mind as to the necessity for keeping him absent, if
possible.

‘Harry, you’ll pardon me; I can’t talk of him,’ said she.

I proposed half-earnestly to foil his return by going to London at once.

‘That’s manly; that’s nice of you,’ Janet said.

This was on our walk from the house at night. My aunt Dorothy listened,
pressing my arm. The next morning Janet urged me to go at once. ‘Keep
him away, bring down grandada, Harry. She cannot quit the island,
because she has given Prince Ernest immediate rendezvous here. You
must not delay to go. Yes, the Countess of Delzenburg shall have your
excuses. And no, I promise you I will run nobody down. Besides, if I do,
aunty will be at hand to plead for the defence, and she can! She has a
way that binds one to accept everything she says, and Temple ought to
study with her for a year or two before he wears his gown. Bring him
back with you and grandada. He is esteemed here at his true worth. I
love him for making her in love with English boys. I leave the men
for those who know them, but English boys are unrivalled, I declare.
Honesty, bravery, modesty, and nice looks! They are so nice in their
style and their way of talking. I tell her, our men may be shy and
sneering,--awkward, I daresay; but our boys beat the world. Do bring
down Temple. I should so like her to see a cricket-match between two
good elevens of our boys, Harry, while she is in England! We could have
arranged for one at Riversley.’

I went, and I repressed the idea, on my way, that Janet had manoeuvred
by sending me off to get rid of me, but I felt myself a living testimony
to her heartlessness: for no girl of any heart, acting the part of
friend, would have allowed me to go without a leave-taking of her I
loved few would have been so cruel as to declare it a duty to go at
all, especially when the chances were that I might return to find the
princess wafted away. Ottilia’s condescension had done her no good.
‘Turn to the right, that’s your path; on.’ She seemed to speak in this
style, much as she made her touch of the reins understood by her ponies.
‘I ‘ll take every care of the princess,’ she said. Her conceit was
unbounded. I revelled in contemptuous laughter at her assumption of the
post of leader with Ottilia. However, it was as well that I should go:
there was no trusting my father.



CHAPTER XLIX. WHICH FORESHADOWS A GENERAL GATHERING

At our Riversley station I observed the squire, in company with Captain
Bulsted, jump into a neighbouring carriage. I joined them, and was
called upon to answer various inquiries. The squire gave me one of his
short tight grasps of the hand, in which there was warmth and shyness,
our English mixture. The captain whispered in my ear: ‘He oughtn’t to be
alone.’

‘How’s the great-grandmother of the tribe?’ said I.

Captain Bulsted nodded, as if he understood, but was at sea until I
mentioned the bottle of rum and the remarkable length of that old lady’s
measurement.

‘Ay, to be sure! a grand old soul,’ he said. ‘You know that scum of old,
Harry.’

I laughed, and so did he, at which I laughed the louder.

‘He laughs, I suppose, because his party’s got a majority in the House,’
said the squire.

‘We gave you a handsome surplus this year, sir.’

‘Sweated out of the country’s skin and bone, ay!’

‘You were complimented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer!’

‘Yes, that fellow’s compliments are like a cabman’s, and cry fool:--he
never thanks you but when he’s overpaid.’

Captain Bulsted applauded the sarcasm.

‘Why did you keep out of knowledge all this time, Hal?’ my grandfather
asked.

I referred him to the captain.

‘Hang it,’ cried Captain Bulsted, ‘do you think I’d have been doing duty
for you if I’d known where to lay hold of you.’

‘Well, if you didn’t shake hands with me, you touched my toes,’ said I,
and thanked him with all my heart for his kindness to an old woman on
the point of the grave. I had some fun to flavour melancholy with.

My grandfather resumed his complaint: ‘You might have gone clean off,
and we none the wiser.’

‘Are we quite sure that his head’s clean on?’ said the mystified
captain.

‘Of course we should run to him, wherever he was, if he was down on his
back,’ the squire muttered.

‘Ay, ay, sir; of course,’ quoth Captain William, frowning to me to
reciprocate this relenting mood. ‘But, Harry, where did you turn off
that night? We sat up expecting you. My poor Julia was in a terrible
fright, my lad. Eh? speak up.’

I raised the little finger.

‘Oh, oh,’ went he, happily reassured; but, reflecting, added: ‘A bout of
it?’

I dropped him a penitent nod.

‘That’s bad, though,’ said he.

‘Then why did you tip me a bottle of rum, Captain William?’

‘By George, Harry, you’ve had a crack o’ the sconce,’ he exclaimed, more
sagaciously than he was aware of.

My grandfather wanted to keep me by his side in London until we two
should start for the island next day; but his business was in the city,
mine toward the West. We appointed to meet two hours after reaching the
terminus.

He turned to me while giving directions to his man.

‘You ‘ve got him down there, I suppose?’

‘My father’s in town, sir. He shall keep away,’ I said.

‘Humph! I mayn’t object to see him.’

This set me thinking.

Captain Bulsted--previously asking me in a very earnest manner whether I
was really all right and sound--favoured me with a hint:

‘The squire has plunged into speculations of his own, or else he is
peeping at somebody else’s. No danger of the dad being mixed up with
Companies? Let’s hope not. Julia pledged her word to Janet that I would
look after the old squire. I suppose I can go home this evening? My girl
hates to be alone.’

‘By all means,’ said I; and the captain proposed to leave the squire at
his hotel, in the event of my failing to join him in the city.

‘But don’t fail, if you can help it,’ he urged me; ‘for things somehow,
my dear Harry, appear to me to look like the compass when the needle
gives signs of atmospheric disturbance. My only reason for saying so is
common observation. You can judge for yourself that he is glad to have
you with him.’

I told the captain I was equally glad; for, in fact, my grandfather’s
quietness and apparently friendly disposition tempted me to petition for
a dower for the princess at once, so that I might be in the position to
offer Prince Ernest on his arrival a distinct alternative; supposing--it
was still but a supposition--Ottilia should empower me. Incessant
dialogues of perpetually shifting tendencies passed between Ottilia and
me in my brain--now dark, now mildly fair, now very wild, on one side at
least. Never, except by downright force of will, could I draw from the
phantom of her one purely irrational outcry, so deeply-rooted was the
knowledge of her nature and mind; and when I did force it, I was no
gainer: a puppet stood in her place--the vision of Ottilia melted out in
threads of vapour.

‘And yet she has come to me; she has braved everything to come.’ I might
say that, to liken her to the women who break rules and read duties by
their own light, but I could not cheat my knowledge of her. Mrs. Waddy
met me in the hall of my father’s house, as usual, pressing, I regretted
to see, one hand to her side. ‘Her heart,’ she said, ‘was easily set
pitty-pat now.’ She had been, by her master’s orders, examined by two of
the chief physicians of the kingdom, ‘baronets both.’ They advised total
rest. As far as I could apprehend, their baronetcies and doings in high
regions had been of more comfort than their prescriptions.

‘What I am I must be,’ she said, meekly; ‘and I cannot quit his service
till he’s abroad again, or I drop. He has promised me a monument. I
don’t want it; but it shows his kindness.’

A letter from Heriot informed me that the affair between Edbury and me
was settled: he could not comprehend how.

‘What is this new Jury of Honour? Who are the jurymen?’ he asked, and
affected wit.

I thanked him for a thrashing in a curt reply.

My father had left the house early in the morning. Mrs. Waddy believed
that he meant to dine that evening at the season’s farewell dinner of
the Trump-Trick Club: ‘Leastways, Tollingby has orders to lay out his
gentlemen’s-dinners’ evening-suit. Yesterday afternoon he flew down to
Chippenden, and was home late. To-day he’s in the City, or one of
the squares. Lady Edbury’s--ah! detained in town with the jaundice or
toothache. He said he was sending to France for a dentist: or was it
Germany, for some lady’s eyes? I am sure I don’t know. Well or ill, so
long as you’re anything to him, he will abound. Pocket and purse! You
know him by this time, Mr. Harry. Oh, my heart!’

A loud knock at the door had brought on the poor creature’s
palpitations.

This visitor was no other than Prince Ernest. The name on his card was
Graf von Delzenburg, and it set my heart leaping to as swift a measure
as Mrs. Waddy’s.

Hearing that I was in the house, he desired to see me.

We met, with a formal bow.

‘I congratulate you right heartily upon being out of the list of
the nekron,’ he said, civilly. ‘I am on my way to one of your
watering-places, whither my family should have preceded me. Do you
publish the names and addresses of visitors daily, as it is the custom
with us?’

I relieved his apprehensions on that head: ‘Here and there, rarely; and
only at the hotels, I believe.’ The excuse was furnished for offering
the princess’s address.

‘Possibly, in a year or two, we may have the pleasure of welcoming you
at Sarkeld,’ said the prince, extending his hand. ‘Then, you have seen
the Countess of Delzenburg?’

‘On the day of her arrival, your Highness. Ladies of my family are
staying on the island.’

‘Ah?’

He paused, and invited me to bow to him. We bowed thus in the room, in
the hall, and at the street-door.

For what purpose could he have called on my father? To hear the worst
at once? That seemed likely, supposing him to have lost his peculiar
confidence in the princess, of which the courtly paces he had put me
through precluded me from judging.

But I guessed acutely that it was not his intention to permit of my
meeting Ottilia a second time. The blow was hard: I felt it as if it had
been struck already, and thought I had gained resignation, until, like a
man reprieved on his road to execution, the narrowed circle of my heart
opened out to the breadth of the world in a minute. Returning from the
city, I hurried to my father’s house, late in the afternoon, and heard
that he had started to overtake the prince, leaving word that the prince
was to be found at his address in the island. No doubt could exist
regarding the course I was bound to take. I drove to my grandfather,
stated my case to him, and by sheer vehemence took the wind out of his
sails; so that when I said, ‘I am the only one alive who can control
my father,’ he answered mildly, ‘Seems t’ other way,’ and chose a small
snort for the indulgence of his private opinion.

‘What! this princess came over alone, and is down driving out with my
girl under an alias?’ he said, showing sour aversion at the prospect of
a collision with the foreign species, as expressive as the ridge of a
cat’s back.

Temple came to dine with us, so I did not leave him quite to himself,
and Temple promised to accompany him down to the island.

‘Oh, go, if you like,’ the fretted old man dismissed me:

‘I’ve got enough to think over. Hold him fast to stand up to me within
forty-eight hours, present time; you know who I mean; I’ve got
a question or two for him. How he treats his foreign princes
and princesses don’t concern me. I’d say, like the
Prevention-Cruelty-Animal’s man to the keeper of the menagerie, “Lecture
‘em, wound their dignity, hurt their feelings, only don’t wop ‘em.”
 I don’t wish any harm to them, but what the deuce they do here nosing
after my grandson!... There, go; we shall be having it out ha’ done with
to-morrow or next day. I’ve run the badger to earth, else I’m not fit to
follow a scent.’

He grumbled at having to consume other than his Riversley bread, butter,
beef, and ale for probably another fortnight. One of the boasts of
Riversley was, that while the rest of the world ate and drank poison,
the Grange lived on its own solid substance, defying malefactory Radical
tricksters.

Temple was left to hear the rest. He had the sweetest of modest wishes
for a re-introduction to Ottilia.



CHAPTER L. WE ARE ALL IN MY FATHER’S NET

Journeying down by the mail-train in the face of a great sunken sunset
broken with cloud, I chanced to ask myself what it was that I seriously
desired to have. My purpose to curb my father was sincere and good; but
concerning my heart’s desires, whitherward did they point? I thought of
Janet--she made me gasp for air; of Ottilia, and she made me long for
earth. Sharp, as I write it, the distinction smote me. I might have been
divided by an electrical shot into two halves, with such an equal force
was I drawn this way and that, pointing nowhither. To strangle the
thought of either one of them was like the pang of death; yet it did not
strike me that I loved the two: they were apart in my mind, actually
as if I had been divided. I passed the Riversley station under sombre
sunset fires, saddened by the fancy that my old home and vivacious Janet
were ashes, past hope. I came on the smell of salt air, and had that
other spirit of woman around me, of whom the controlled seadeeps were
an image, who spoke to my soul like starlight. Much wise counsel, and
impatience of the wisdom, went on within me. I walked like a man with a
yawning wound, and had to whip the sense of passion for a drug. Toward
which one it strove I know not; it was blind and stormy as the night.

Not a boatman would take me across. The lights of the island lay like
a crown on the water. I paced the ramparts, eyeing them, breathing the
keen salt of thundering waves, until they were robbed of their magic by
the coloured Fast.

It is, I have learnt, out of the conflict of sensations such as I then
underwent that a young man’s brain and morality, supposing him not
to lean overmuch to sickly sentiment, becomes gradually enriched and
strengthened, and himself shaped for capable manhood. I was partly
conscious of a better condition in the morning; and a sober morning
it was to me after my long sentinel’s step to and fro. I found myself
possessed of one key--whether the right one or not--wherewith to read
the princess, which was never possible to me when I was under stress of
passion, or of hope or despair; my perplexities over what she said, how
she looked, ceased to trouble me. I read her by this strange light: that
she was a woman who could only love intelligently--love, that is, in the
sense of giving herself. She had the power of passion, and it could be
stirred; but he who kindled it wrecked his chance if he could not stand
clear in her intellect’s unsparing gaze. Twice already she must have
felt herself disillusioned by me. This third time, possibly, she blamed
her own fatally credulous tenderness, not me; but it was her third
awakening, and could affection and warmth of heart combat it? Her
child’s enthusiasm for my country had prepared her for the impression
which the waxen mind of the dreamy invalid received deeply; and
so, aided by the emotional blood of youth, she gave me place in her
imagination, probing me still curiously, as I remembered, at a season
when her sedate mind was attaining to joint deliberations with the
impulsive overgenerous heart.

Then ensued for her the successive shocks of discernment. She knew the
to have some of the vices, many follies, all the intemperateness of men
who carve a way for themselves in the common roads, if barely they do
that. And resembling common men (men, in a judgement elective as hers,
common, however able), I was not assuredly to be separated by her from
my associations; from the thought of my father, for example. Her look at
him in the lake-palace library, and her manner in unfolding and folding
his recent letter to her, and in one or two necessitated allusions,
embraced a kind of grave, pitiful humour, beyond smiles or any outward
expression, as if the acknowledgement that it was so quite obliterated
the wonder that it should be so--that one such as he could exercise
influence upon her destiny. Or she may have made her reckoning
generally, not personally, upon our human destinies: it is the
more likely, if, as I divine, the calm oval of her lifted eyelids
contemplated him in the fulness of the recognition that this world,
of which we hope unuttered things, can be shifted and swayed by an
ignis-fatuus. The father of one now seen through, could hardly fail of
being transfixed himself. It was horrible to think of. I would rather
have added a vice to my faults than that she should have penetrated him.

Nearing the island, I was reminded of the early morning when I landed
on the Flemish flats. I did not expect a similar surprise, but before my
rowers had pulled in, the tall beaconhead of old Schwartz notified that
his mistress might be abroad. Janet walked with her. I ran up the steps
to salute them, and had Ottilia’s hand in mine.

‘Prince Ernest has arrived?’

‘My father came yesterday evening.’

‘Do you leave to-day?’

‘I cannot tell; he will decide.’

It seemed a good omen, until I scanned Janet’s sombre face.

‘You will not see us out for the rest of the day, Harry,’ said she.

‘That is your arrangement?’

‘It is.’

‘Your own?’

‘Mine, if you like.’

There was something hard in her way of speaking, as though she
blamed me, and the princess were under her protection against me. She
vouchsafed no friendly significance of look and tone.

In spite of my readiness to criticize her (which in our language means
condemn) for always assuming leadership with whomsoever she might be, I
was impressed by the air of high-bred friendliness existing between her
and the princess. Their interchange was pleasant to hear. Ottilia had
caught the spirit of her frank manner of speech; and she, though in a
less degree, the princess’s fine ease and sweetness. They conversed,
apparently, like equal minds. On material points, Janet unhesitatingly
led. It was she who brought the walk to a close.

‘Now, Harry, you had better go and have a little sleep. I should like to
speak to you early.’

Ottilia immediately put her hand out to me.

I begged permission to see her to her door.

Janet replied for her, indicating old Schwartz: ‘We have a protector,
you see, six feet and a half.’

An hour later, Schwartz was following her to the steps of her hotel.
She saw me, and waited. For a wonder, she displayed reluctance in
disburdening herself of what she had to say. ‘Harry, you know that
he has come? He and Prince Ernest came together. Get him to leave the
island at once: he can return to-morrow. Grandada writes of wishing to
see him. Get him away to-day.’

‘Is the prince going to stay here?’ I asked.

‘No. I daresay I am only guessing; I hope so. He has threatened the
prince.’

‘What with?’

‘Oh! Harry, can’t you understand? I’m no reader of etiquette, but even
I can see that the story of a young princess travelling over to England
alone to visit... and you..., and her father fetching her away! The
prince is almost at his mercy, unless you make the man behave like a
gentleman. This is exactly the thing Miss Goodwin feared!’

‘But who’s to hear of the story?’ said I.

Janet gave an impatient sigh.

‘Do you mean that my father has threatened to publish it, Janet?’

‘I won’t say he has. He has made the prince afraid to move: that I think
is true.’

‘Did the princess herself mention it to you?’

‘She understands her situation, I am sure.’

‘Did she speak of “the man,” as you call him?’

‘Yes: not as I do. You must try by-and-by to forgive me. Whether he set
a trap or not, he has decoyed her--don’t frown at words--and it remains
for you to act as I don’t doubt you will; but lose no time. Determine.
Oh! if I were a man!’

‘You would muzzle us?’

‘Muzzle, or anything you please; I would make any one related to me
behave honourably. I would give him the alternative...’

‘You foolish girl! suppose he took it?’

‘I would make him feel my will. He should not take it. Keep to the
circumstances, Harry. If you have no control over him--I should think I
was not fit to live, in such a position! No control over him at a moment
like this? and the princess in danger of having her reputation hurt!
Surely, Harry! But why should I speak to you as if you were undecided!’

‘Where is he?’

‘At the house where you sleep. He surrendered his rooms here very
kindly.’

‘Aunty has seen him?’

Janet blushed: I thought I knew why. It was for subtler reasons than I
should have credited her with conceiving.

‘She sent for him, at my request, late last night. She believed her
influence would be decisive. So do I. She could not even make the
man perceive that he was acting--to use her poor dear old-fashioned
word--reprehensibly in frightening the prince to further your interests.
From what I gathered he went off in a song about them. She said he
talked so well! And aunty Dorothy, too! I should nearly as soon have
expected grandada to come in for his turn of the delusion. How I wish he
was here! Uberly goes by the first boat to bring him down. I feel with
Miss Goodwin that it will be a disgrace for all of us--the country’s
disgrace. As for our family!... Harry, and your name! Good-bye. Do your
best.’

I was in the mood to ask, ‘On behalf of the country?’ She had, however,
a glow and a ringing articulation in her excitement that forbade
trifling; a minute’s reflection set me weighing my power of will against
my father’s. I nodded to her.

‘Come to us when you are at liberty,’ she called.

I have said that I weighed my power of will against my father’s.
Contemplation of the state of the scales did not send me striding to
meet him. Let it be remembered--I had it strongly in memory that he
habitually deluded himself under the supposition that the turn of all
events having an aspect of good fortune had been planned by him of old,
and were offered to him as the legitimately-won fruits of a politic
life. While others deemed him mad, or merely reckless, wild, a creature
living for the day, he enjoyed the conceit of being a profound schemer,
in which he was fortified by a really extraordinary adroitness to take
advantage of occurrences: and because he was prompt in an emergency,
and quick to profit of a crisis, he was deluded to imagine that he had
created it. Such a man would be with difficulty brought to surrender his
prize.

Again, there was his love for me. ‘Pater est, Pamphile;--difficile
est.’ How was this vast conceit of a not unreal paternal love to be
encountered? The sense of honour and of decency might appeal to him
personally; would either of them get a hearing if he fancied them to
be standing in opposition to my dearest interests? I, unhappily, as the
case would be sure to present itself to him, appeared the living example
of his eminently politic career. After establishing me the heir of one
of the wealthiest of English commoners, would he be likely to forego any
desperate chance of ennobling me by the brilliant marriage? His dreadful
devotion to me extinguished the hope that he would, unless I should
happen to be particularly masterful in dealing with him. I heard his
nimble and overwhelming volubility like a flood advancing. That could be
withstood, and his arguments and persuasions. But by what steps could I
restrain the man himself? I said ‘the man,’ as Janet did. He figured
in my apprehensive imagination as an engine more than as an individual.
Lassitude oppressed me. I felt that I required every access of strength
possible, physical besides moral, in anticipation of our encounter,
and took a swim in sea-water, which displaced my drowsy fit, and some
alarming intimations of cowardice menacing a paralysis of the will: I
had not altogether recovered from my gipsy drubbing. And now I wanted to
have the contest over instantly. It seemed presumable that my father had
slept at my lodgings. There, however, the report of him was, that he
had inspected the rooms, highly complimented the owner of them, and
vanished.

Returning to the pier, I learnt that he had set sail in his hired yacht
for the sister town on the Solent, at an early hour:--for what purpose?
I knew of it too late to intercept it. One of the squire’s horses
trotted me over; I came upon Colonel Hibbert Segrave near the
Club-house, and heard that my father was off again:

‘But your German prince and papa-in-law shall be free of the Club for
the next fortnight,’ said he, and cordially asked to have the date of
the marriage. My face astonished him. He excused himself for speaking of
this happy event so abruptly. A sting of downright anger drove me back
at a rapid canter. It flashed on me that this Prince Ernest, whose
suave fashion of depressing me, and philosophical skill in managing his
daughter, had induced me to regard him as a pattern of astuteness, was
really both credulous and feeble, or else supremely unsuspecting: and I
was confirmed in the latter idea on hearing that he had sailed to visit
the opposite harbour and docks on board my father’s yacht. Janet shared
my secret opinion.

‘The prince is a gentleman,’ she said.

Her wrath and disgust were unspeakable. My aunt Dorothy blamed her for
overdue severity. ‘The prince, I suppose, goes of his own free will
where he pleases.’

Janet burst out, ‘Oh! can’t you see through it, aunty? The prince goes
about without at all knowing that the person who takes him--Harry sees
it--is making him compromise himself: and by-and-by the prince will
discover that he has no will of his own, whatever he may wish to resolve
upon doing.’

‘Is he quite against Harry?’ asked my aunt Dorothy.

‘Dear aunty, he ‘s a prince, and a proud man. He will never in his
lifetime consent to... to what you mean, without being hounded into it.
I haven’t the slightest idea whether anything will force him. I know
that the princess would have too much pride to submit, even to save her
name. But it ‘s her name that ‘s in danger. Think of the scandal to
a sovereign princess! I know the signification of that now; I used to
laugh at Harry’s “sovereign princess.” She is one, and thorough! there
is no one like her. Don’t you understand, aunty, that the intrigue,
plot--I don’t choose to be nice upon terms--may be perfectly successful,
and do good to nobody. The prince may be tricked; the princess, I am
sure, will not.’

Janet’s affectation of an intimate and peculiar knowledge of the
princess was a show of her character that I was accustomed to: still, it
was evident they had conversed much, and perhaps intimately. I led her
to tell me that the princess had expressed no views upon my father. ‘He
does not come within her scope, Harry.’ ‘Scope’ was one of Janet’s new
words, wherewith she would now and then fall to seasoning a serviceable
but savourless outworn vocabulary of the common table. In spite of that
and other offences, rendered prominent to me by the lifting of her lip
and her frown when she had to speak of my father, I was on her side, not
on his. Her estimation of the princess was soundly based. She discerned
exactly the nature of Ottilia’s entanglement, and her peril.

She and my aunt Dorothy passed the afternoon with Ottilia, while I
crossed the head of the street, looking down at the one house, where
the princess was virtually imprisoned, either by her father’s express
injunction or her own discretion. And it was as well that she should not
be out. The yachting season had brought many London men to the island. I
met several who had not forgotten the newspaper-paragraph assertions and
contradictions. Lord Alton, Admiral Loftus, and others were on the pier
and in the outfitters’ shops, eager for gossip, as the languid stretch
of indolence inclines men to be. The Admiral asked me for the whereabout
of Prince Ernest’s territory. He too said that the prince would be free
of the Club during his residence, adding:

‘Where is he?’--not a question demanding an answer. The men might have
let the princess go by, but there would have been questions urgently
demanding answers had she been seen by their women.

Late in the evening my father’s yacht was sighted from the pier. Just as
he reached his moorings, and his boat was hauled round, the last steamer
came in. Sharp-eyed Janet saw the squire on board among a crowd, and
Temple next to him, supporting his arm.

‘Has grandada been ill?’ she exclaimed.

My chief concern was to see my father’s head rising in the midst of the
crowd, uncovering repeatedly. Prince Ernest and General Goodwin were
behind him, stepping off the lower pier-platform. The General did not
look pleased. My grandfather, with Janet holding his arm, in the place
of Temple, stood waiting to see that his man had done his duty by the
luggage.

My father, advancing, perceived me, and almost taking the squire into
his affectionate salutation, said:

‘Nothing could be more opportune than your arrival, Mr. Beltham.’

The squire rejoined: ‘I wanted to see you, Mr. Richmond; and not in
public.’

‘I grant the private interview, sir, at your convenience.’

Janet went up to General Goodwin. My father talked to me, and lost a
moment in shaking Temple’s hand and saying kind things.

‘Name any hour you please, Mr. Beltham,’ he resumed; ‘meantime, I shall
be glad to effect the introduction between Harry’s grandfather and his
Highness Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.’

He turned. General Goodwin was hurrying the prince up the steps, the
squire at the same time retreating hastily. I witnessed the spectacle of
both parties to the projected introduction swinging round to make their
escape. My father glanced to right and left. He covered in the airiest
fashion what would have been confusion to another by carrying on a
jocose remark that he had left half spoken to Temple, and involved
Janet in it, and soon--through sheer amiable volubility and his taking
manner--the squire himself for a minute or so.

‘Harry, I have to tell you she is not unhappy,’ Janet whispered rapidly.
‘She is reading of one of our great men alive now. She is glad to be on
our ground.’ Janet named a famous admiral, kindling as a fiery beacon to
our blood. She would have said more: she looked the remainder; but she
could have said nothing better fitted to spur me to the work she wanted
done. Mournfulness dropped on me like a cloud in thinking of the bright
little princess of my boyhood, and the Ottilia of to-day, faithful
to her early passion for our sea-heroes and my country, though it had
grievously entrapped her. And into what hands! Not into hands which
could cast one ray of honour on a devoted head. The contrast between the
sane service--giving men she admired, and the hopping skipping social
meteor, weaver of webs, thrower of nets, who offered her his history
for a nuptial acquisition, was ghastly, most discomforting. He seemed to
have entangled us all.

He said that he had. He treated me now confessedly as a cipher. The
prince, the princess, my grandfather, and me--he had gathered us
together, he said. I heard from him that the prince, assisted by him
in the part of an adviser, saw no way of cutting the knot but by a
marriage. All were at hand for a settlement of the terms:--Providence
and destiny were dragged in.

‘Let’s have no theatrical talk,’ I interposed.

‘Certainly, Richie; the plainest English,’ he assented.

This was on the pier, while he bowed and greeted passing figures. I
dared not unlink my arm, for fear of further mischief. I got him to my
rooms, and insisted on his dining there.

‘Dry bread will do,’ he said.

My anticipations of the nature of our wrestle were correct. But I had
not expected him to venture on the assertion that the prince was for the
marriage. He met me at every turn with this downright iteration. ‘The
prince consents: he knows his only chance is to yield. I have him fast.’

‘How?’ I inquired.

‘How, Richie? Where is your perspicuity? I have him here. I loosen a
thousand tongues on him. I--’

‘No, not on him; on the princess, you mean.’

‘On him. The princess is the willing party; she and you are one. On
him, I say. ‘Tis but a threat: I hold it in terrorem. And by heaven, son
Richie, it assures me I have not lived and fought for nothing. “Now is
the day and now is the hour.” On your first birthday, my boy, I swore to
marry you to one of the highest ladies upon earth: she was, as it turns
out, then unborn. No matter: I keep my oath. Abandon it? pooh! you
are--forgive me--silly. Pardon me for remarking it, you have not that
dashing courage--never mind. The point is, I have my prince in his trap.
We are perfectly polite, but I have him, and he acknowledges it;
he shrugs: love has beaten him. Very well. And observe: I permit no
squire-of-low-degree insinuations; none of that. The lady--all earthly
blessings on her!--does not stoop to Harry Richmond. I have the
announcement in the newspapers. I maintain it the fruit of a life of
long and earnest endeavour, legitimately won, by heaven it is! and with
the constituted authorities of my native land against me. Your grandad
proposes formally for the princess to-morrow morning.’

He maddened me. Merely to keep him silent I burst out in a flux of
reproaches as torrent-like as his own could be; and all the time I was
wondering whether it was true that a man who talked as he did, in his
strain of florid flimsy, had actually done a practical thing.

The effect of my vehemence was to brace him and make him sedately
emphatic. He declared himself to have gained entire possession of the
prince’s mind. He repeated his positive intention to employ his power
for my benefit. Never did power of earth or of hell seem darker to me
than he at that moment, when solemnly declaiming that he was prepared to
forfeit my respect and love, die sooner than ‘yield his prince.’ He
wore a new aspect, spoke briefly and pointedly, using the phrases of a
determined man, and in voice and gesture signified that he had us all in
a grasp of iron. The charge of his having plotted to bring it about he
accepted with exultation.

‘I admit,’ he said, ‘I did not arrange to have Germany present for a
witness besides England, but since he is here, I take advantage of the
fact, and to-morrow you will see young Eckart down.’

I cried out, as much enraged at my feebleness to resist him, as in
disgust of his unscrupulous tricks.

‘Ay, you have not known me, Richie,’ said he. ‘I pilot you into harbour,
and all you can do is just the creaking of the vessel to me. You are in
my hands. I pilot you. I have you the husband of the princess within the
month. No other course is open to her. And I have the assurance that she
loses nothing by it. She is yours, my son.’

‘She will not be. You have wrecked my last chance. You cover me with
dishonour.’

‘You are a youngster, Richie. ‘Tis the wish of her heart. Probably while
you and I are talking it over, the prince is confessing that he has no
escape. He has not a loophole! She came to you; you take her. I am far
from withholding my admiration of her behaviour; but there it is--she
came. Not consent? She is a ruined woman if she refuses!’

‘Through you, through you!--through my father!’

‘Have you both gone mad?’

‘Try to see this,’ I implored him. ‘She will not be subjected by any
threats. The very whisper of one will make her turn from me...’

He interrupted. ‘Totally the contrary. The prince acknowledges that you
are master of her affections.’

‘Consistently with her sense of honour and respect for us.’

‘Tell me of her reputation, Richie.’

‘You pretend that you can damage it!’

‘Pretend? I pretend in the teeth of all concerned to establish her
happiness and yours, and nothing human shall stop me. I have you
grateful to me before your old dad lays his head on his last pillow. And
that reminds me: I surrender my town house and furniture to you. Waddy
has received the word. By the way, should you hear of a good doctor for
heart-disease, tell me: I have my fears for the poor soul.’

He stood up, saying, ‘Richie, I am not like Jorian, to whom a
lodging-house dinner is no dinner, and an irreparable loss, but I must
have air. I go forth on a stroll.’

It was impossible for me to allow it. I stopped him.

We were in the midst of a debate as to his right of personal freedom,
upon the singularity of which he commented with sundry ejaculations,
when Temple arrived and General Goodwin sent up his card. Temple and I
left the general closeted with my father, and stood at the street-door.
He had seen the princess, having at her request been taken to present
his respects to her by Janet. How she looked, what she said, he was
dull in describing; he thought her lively, though she was pale. She had
mentioned my name, ‘kindly,’ he observed. And he knew, or suspected, the
General to be an emissary from the prince. But he could not understand
the exact nature of the complication, and plagued me with a mixture of
blunt inquiries and the delicate reserve proper to him so much that
I had to look elsewhere for counsel and sympathy. Janet had told him
everything; still he was plunged in wonder, tempting me to think the
lawyer’s mind of necessity bourgeois, for the value of a sentiment
seemed to have no weight in his estimation of the case. Nor did he
appear disinclined to excuse my father. Some of his remarks partly
swayed me, in spite of my seeing that they were based on the supposition
of an ‘all for love’ adventure of a mad princess. They whispered a
little hope, when I was adoring her passionately for being the reverse
of whatever might have given hope a breath.

General Goodwin, followed by my father, came down and led me aside after
I had warned Temple not to let my father elude him. The General was
greatly ruffled. ‘Clara tells me she can rely on you,’ he said. ‘I am
at the end of my arguments with that man, short of sending him to the
lock-up. You will pardon me, Mr. Harry; I foresaw the scrapes in store
for you, and advised you.’

‘You did, General,’ I confessed. ‘Will you tell me what it is Prince
Ernest is in dread of?’

‘A pitiable scandal, sir; and if he took my recommendation, he would
find instant means of punishing the man who dares to threaten him. You
know it.’

I explained that I was aware of the threat, not of the degree of the
prince’s susceptibility; and asked him if he had seen the princess.

‘I have had the honour,’ he replied, stiffly. ‘You gain nothing with her
by this infamous proceeding.’

I swallowed my anger, and said, ‘Do you accuse me, General?’

‘I do not accuse you,’ he returned, unbendingly. ‘You chose your path
some ten or twelve years ago, and you must take the consequences. I
foresaw it; but this I will say, I did not credit the man with his
infernal cleverness. If I speak to you at all, I must speak my mind.
I thought him a mere buffoon and spendthrift, flying his bar-sinister
story for the sake of distinction. He has schemed up to this point
successfully: he has the prince in his toils. I would cut through them,
as I have informed Prince Ernest. I daresay different positions lead to
different reasonings; the fellow appears to have a fascination over him.
Your father, Mr. Harry, is guilty now--he is guilty, I reiterate, now of
a piece of iniquity that makes me ashamed to own him for a countryman.’

The General shook himself erect. ‘Are you unable to keep him in?’ he
asked.

My nerves were pricking and stinging with the insults I had to listen
to, and conscience’s justification of them.

He repeated the question.

‘I will do what I can,’ I said, unsatisfactorily to myself and to him,
for he transposed our situations, telling me the things he would say and
do in my place; things not dissimilar to those I had already said and
done, only more toweringly enunciated; and for that reason they struck
me as all the more hopelessly ineffectual, and made me despair.

My dumbness excited his ire. ‘Come,’ said he; ‘the lady is a spoilt
child. She behaved foolishly; but from your point of view you should
feel bound to protect her on that very account. Do your duty, young
gentleman. He is, I believe, fond of you, and if so, you have him by a
chain. I tell you frankly, I hold you responsible.’

His way of speaking of the princess opened an idea of the world’s, in
the event of her name falling into its clutches.

I said again, ‘I will do what I can,’ and sang out for Temple.

He was alone. My father had slipped from him to leave a card at the
squire’s hotel. General Goodwin touched Temple on the shoulder kindly,
in marked contrast to his treatment of me, and wished us good-night.
Nothing had been heard of my father by Janet, but while I was sitting
with her, at a late hour, his card was brought up, and a pencilled
entreaty for an interview the next morning.

‘That will suit grandada,’ Janet said. ‘He commissioned me before going
to bed to write the same for him.’

She related that the prince was in a state of undisguised distraction.
From what I could comprehend--it appeared incredible--he regarded his
daughter’s marriage as the solution of the difficulty, the sole way out
of the meshes.

‘Is not that her wish?’ said Temple; perhaps with a wish of his own.

‘Oh, if you think a lady like the Princess Ottilia is led by her
wishes,’ said Janet. Her radiant perception of an ideal in her sex
(the first she ever had) made her utterly contemptuous toward the less
enlightened.

We appointed the next morning at half-past eleven for my father’s visit.

‘Not a minute later,’ Janet said in my ear, urgently. ‘Don’t--don’t let
him move out of your sight, Harry! The princess is convinced you are not
to blame.’

I asked her whether she had any knowledge of the squire’s designs.

‘I have not, on my honour,’ she answered. ‘But I hope... It is so
miserable to think of this disgraceful thing! She is too firm to give
way. She does not blame you. I am sure I do not; only, Harry, one always
feels that if one were in another’s place, in a case like this, I could
and would command him. I would have him obey me. One is not born to
accept disgrace even from a father. I should say, “You shall not stir,
if you mean to act dishonourably.” One is justified, I am sure, in
breaking a tie of relationship that involves you in dishonour. Grandada
has not spoken a word to me on the subject. I catch at straws. This
thing burns me! Oh, good-night, Harry. I can’t sleep.’

‘Good-night,’ she called softly to Temple on the stairs below. I heard
the poor fellow murmuring good-night to himself in the street, and
thought him happier than I. He slept at a room close to the hotel.

A note from Clara Goodwin adjured me, by her memory of the sweet, brave,
gracious fellow she loved in other days, to be worthy of what I had
been. The General had unnerved her reliance on me.

I sat up for my father until long past midnight. When he came his
appearance reminded me of the time of his altercation with Baroness
Turckems under the light of the blazing curtains: he had supped and
drunk deeply, and he very soon proclaimed that I should find him
invincible, which, as far as insensibility to the strongest appeals to
him went, he was.

‘Deny you love her, deny she loves you, deny you are one--I knot you
fast!’

He had again seen Prince Ernest; so he said, declaring that the Prince
positively desired the marriage; would have it. ‘And I,’ he dramatized
their relative situations, ‘consented.’

After my experience of that night, I forgive men who are unmoved by
displays of humour. Commonly we think it should be irresistible. His
description of the thin-skinned sensitive prince striving to run
and dodge for shelter from him, like a fever-patient pursued by a
North-easter, accompanied by dozens of quaint similes full of his mental
laughter, made my loathing all the more acute. But I had not been an
equal match for him previous to his taking wine; it was waste of breath
and heart to contend with him. I folded my arms tight, sitting rigidly
silent, and he dropped on the sofa luxuriously.

‘Bed, Richie!’ he waved to me. ‘You drink no wine, you cannot stand
dissipation as I do. Bed, my dear boy! I am a God, sir, inaccessible to
mortal ailments! Seriously, dear boy, I have never known an illness in
my life. I have killed my hundreds of poor devils who were for imitating
me. This I boast--I boast constitution. And I fear, Richie, you have
none of my superhuman strength. Added to that, I know I am watched over.
I ask--I have: I scheme the tricks are in my hand! It may be the doing
of my mother in heaven; there is the fact for you to reflect on. “Stand
not in my way, nor follow me too far,” would serve me for a motto
admirably, and you can put it in Latin, Richie. Bed! You shall turn your
scholarship to account as I do my genius in your interest. On my soul,
that motto in Latin will requite me. Now to bed.’

‘No,’ said I. ‘You have got away from me once. I shall keep you in sight
and hearing, if I have to lie at your door for it. You will go with me
to London to-morrow. I shall treat you as a man I have to guard, and I
shall not let you loose before I am quite sure of you.’

‘Loose!’ he exclaimed, throwing up an arm and a leg.

‘I mean, sir, that you shall be in my presence wherever you are, and
I will take care you don’t go far and wide. It’s useless to pretend
astonishment. I don’t argue and I don’t beseech any further: I just sit
on guard, as I would over a powder-cask.’

My father raised himself on an elbow. ‘The explosion,’ he said,
examining his watch, ‘occurred at about five minutes to eleven--we are
advancing into the morning--last night. I received on your behalf the
congratulations of friends Loftus, Alton, Segrave, and the rest, at
that hour. So, my dear Richie, you are sitting on guard over the empty
magazine.’

I listened with a throbbing forehead, and controlled the choking in my
throat, to ask him whether he had touched the newspapers.

‘Ay, dear lad, I have sprung my mine in them,’ he replied.

‘You have sent word--?’

‘I have despatched a paragraph to the effect, that the prince and
princess have arrived to ratify the nuptial preliminaries.’

‘You expect it to appear this day?’

‘Or else my name and influence are curiously at variance with the
confidence I repose in them, Richie.’

‘Then I leave you to yourself,’ I said. ‘Prince Ernest knows he has to
expect this statement in the papers?’

‘We trumped him with that identical court-card, Richie.’

‘Very well. To-morrow, after we have been to my grandfather, you and I
part company for good, sir. It costs me too much.’

‘Dear old Richie,’ he laughed, gently. ‘And now to bye-bye! My blessing
on you now and always.’

He shut his eyes.



CHAPTER LI. AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER’S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT

The morning was sultry with the first rising of the sun. I knew that
Ottilia and Janet would be out. For myself, I dared not leave the house.
I sat in my room, harried by the most penetrating snore which can ever
have afflicted wakeful ears. It proclaimed so deep-seated a peacefulness
in the bosom of the disturber, and was so arrogant, so ludicrous, and
inaccessible to remonstrance, that it sounded like a renewal of our
midnight altercation on the sleeper’s part. Prolonged now and then
beyond all bounds, it ended in the crashing blare whereof utter
wakefulness cannot imagine honest sleep to be capable, but a playful
melody twirled back to the regular note. He was fast asleep on the
sitting-room sofa, while I walked fretting and panting. To this twinship
I seemed condemned. In my heart nevertheless there was a reserve of
wonderment at his apparent astuteness and resolution, and my old love
for him whispered disbelief in his having disgraced me. Perhaps it was
wilful self-deception. It helped me to meet him with a better face.

We both avoided the subject of our difference for some time: he would
evidently have done so altogether, and used his best and sweetest manner
to divert me: but when I struck on it, asking him if he had indeed told
me the truth last night, his features clouded as though with an effort
of patience. To my consternation, he suddenly broke away, with his arms
up, puffing and stammering, stamping his feet. He would have a truce--he
insisted on a truce, I understood him to exclaim, and that I was like
a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master. He raved of
the gallant down-rightedness of the young bloods of his day, and how
splendidly this one and that had compassed their ends by winning great
ladies, lawfully, or otherwise. For several minutes he was in a state
of frenzy, appealing to his pattern youths of a bygone generation, as to
moral principles--stuttering, and of a dark red hue from the neck to
the temples. I refrained from a scuffle of tongues. Nor did he excuse
himself after he had cooled. His hand touched instinctively for his
pulse, and, with a glance at the ceiling, he exclaimed, ‘Good Lord!’ and
brought me to his side. ‘These wigwam houses check my circulation,’ said
he. ‘Let us go out-let us breakfast on board.’

The open air restored him, and he told me that he had been merely
oppressed by the architect of the inferior classes, whose ceiling sat
on his head. My nerves, he remarked to me, were very exciteable. ‘You
should take your wine, Richie,--you require it. Your dear mother had
a low-toned nervous system.’ I was silent, and followed him, at once a
captive and a keeper.

This day of slackened sails and a bright sleeping water kept the
yachtsmen on land; there was a crowd to meet the morning boat. Foremost
among those who stepped out of it was the yellow-haired Eckart, little
suspecting what the sight of him signalled to me. I could scarcely greet
him at all, for in him I perceived that my father had fully committed
himself to his plot, and left me nothing to hope. Eckart said something
of Prince Hermann. As we were walking off the pier, I saw Janet
conversing with Prince Ernest, and the next minute Hermann himself was
one of the group. I turned to Eckart for an explanation.

‘Didn’t I tell you he called at your house in London and travelled down
with me this morning!’ said Eckart.

My father looked in the direction of the princes, but his face was for
the moment no index. They bowed to Janet, and began talking hurriedly
in the triangle of road between her hotel, the pier, and the way to
the villas: passing on, and coming to a full halt, like men who are not
reserving their minds. My father stept out toward them. He was met by
Prince Ernest. Hermann turned his back.

It being the hour of the appointment, I delivered Eckart over to
Temple’s safe-keeping, and went up to Janet. ‘Don’t be late, Harry,’ she
said.

I asked her if she knew the object of the meeting appointed by my
grandfather.

She answered impatiently, ‘Do get him away from the prince.’ And then:
‘I ought to tell you the princess is well, and so on--pardon me just
now: Grandada is kept waiting, and I don’t like it.’

Her actual dislike was to see Prince Ernest in dialogue with my father,
it seemed to me; and the manner of both, which was, one would have said,
intimate, anything but the manner of adversaries. Prince Ernest appeared
to affect a pleasant humour; he twice, after shaking my father’s hand,
stepped back to him, as if to renew some impression. Their attitude
declared them to be on the best of terms. Janet withdrew her attentive
eyes from observing them, and threw a world of meaning into her
abstracted gaze at me. My father’s advance put her to flight.

Yet she gave him the welcome of a high-bred young woman when he entered
the drawing-room of my grandfather’s hotel-suite. She was alone, and she
obliged herself to accept conversation graciously. He recommended her
to try the German Baths for the squire’s gout, and evidently amused her
with his specific probations for English persons designing to travel
in company, that they should previously live together in a house with a
collection of undisciplined chambermaids, a musical footman, and a mad
cook: to learn to accommodate their tempers. ‘I would add a touch of
earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party
know one another’s edges before starting.’ This was too far a shot of
nonsense for Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or
stupidity, or trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding. ‘I,
for my part,’ said he, ‘stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies
himself a born and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and
no dog with a turn for feeling himself pulled by the collar. And that
reminds me you are amateur of dogs. Have you a Pomeranian boar-hound?’

‘No,’ said Janet; ‘I have never even seen one’

‘That high.’ My father raised his hand flat.

‘Bigger than our Newfoundlands!’

‘Without exaggeration, big as a pony. You will permit me to send you
one, warranted to have passed his distemper, which can rarely be done
for our human species, though here and there I venture to guarantee my
man as well as my dog.’

Janet interposed her thanks, declining to take the dog, but he dwelt on
the dog’s charms, his youth, stature, appearance, fitness, and grandeur,
earnestly. I had to relieve her apprehensions by questioning where the
dog was.

‘In Germany,’ he said.

It was not improbable, nor less so that the dog was in Pomerania
likewise.

The entry of my aunt Dorothy, followed by my grandfather, was silent.

‘Be seated,’ the old man addressed us in a body, to cut short particular
salutations.

My father overshadowed him with drooping shoulders.

Janet wished to know whether she was to remain.

‘I like you by me always,’ he answered, bluff and sharp.

‘We have some shopping to do,’ my aunt Dorothy murmured, showing she was
there against her will.

‘Do you shop out of London?’ said my father; and for some time he
succeeded in making us sit for the delusive picture of a comfortable
family meeting.

My grandfather sat quite still, Janet next to him. ‘When you’ve
finished, Mr. Richmond,’ he remarked.

‘Mr. Beltham, I was telling Miss Beltham that I join in the abuse of
London exactly because I love it. A paradox! she says. But we seem to be
effecting a kind of insurance on the life of the things we love best by
crying them down violently. You have observed it? Denounce them--they
endure for ever! So I join any soul on earth in decrying our dear
London. The naughty old City can bear it.’

There was a clearing of throats. My aunt Dorothy’s foot tapped the
floor.

‘But I presume you have done me the honour to invite me to this
conference on a point of business, Mr. Beltham?’ said my father,
admonished by the hint.

‘I have, sir,’ the squire replied.

‘And I also have a point. And, in fact, it is urgent, and with your
permission, Mr. Beltham, I will lead the way.’

‘No, sir, if you please.

I’m a short speaker, and go to it at once, and I won’t detain you a
second after you’ve answered me.’

My father nodded to this, with the conciliatory comment that it was
business-like.

The old man drew out his pocket-book.

‘You paid a debt,’ he said deliberately, ‘amounting to twenty-one
thousand pounds to my grandson’s account.’

‘Oh! a debt! I did, sir. Between father and boy, dad and lad; debts! ...
but use your own terms, I pray you.’

‘I don’t ask you where that money is now. I ask you to tell me where you
got it from.’

‘You speak bluntly, my dear sir.’

‘You won’t answer, then?’

‘You ask the question as a family matter? I reply with alacrity, to the
best of my ability: and with my hand on my heart, Mr. Beltham, let me
assure you, I very heartily desire the information to be furnished to
me. Or rather--why should I conceal it? The sources are irregular, but
a child could toddle its way to them--you take my indication. Say that
I obtained it from my friends. My friends, Mr. Beltham, are of the kind
requiring squeezing. Government, as my chum and good comrade, Jorian
DeWitt, is fond of saying, is a sponge--a thing that when you dive deep
enough to catch it gives liberal supplies, but will assuredly otherwise
reverse the process by acting the part of an absorbent. I get what I get
by force of arms, or I might have perished long since.’

‘Then you don’t know where you got it from, sir?’

‘Technically, you are correct, sir.’

‘A bird didn’t bring it, and you didn’t find it in the belly of a fish.’

‘Neither of these prodigies. They have occurred in books I am bound to
believe; they did not happen to me.’

‘You swear to me you don’t know the man, woman, or committee, who gave
you that sum?’

‘I do not know, Mr. Beltham. In an extraordinary history, extraordinary
circumstances! I have experienced so many that I am surprised at
nothing.’

‘You suppose you got it from some fool?’

‘Oh! if you choose to indict Government collectively?’

‘You pretend you got it from Government?’

‘I am termed a Pretender by some, Mr. Beltham. The facts are these: I
promised to refund the money, and I fulfilled the promise. There you
have the only answer I can make to you. Now to my own affair. I come to
request you to demand the hand of the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld
on behalf of my son Harry, your grandson; and I possess the assurance of
the prince, her father, that it will be granted. Doubtless you, sir, are
of as old a blood as the prince himself. You will acknowledge that the
honour brought to the family by an hereditary princess is considerable:
it is something. I am prepared to accompany you to his Highness, or not,
as you please. It is but a question of dotation, and a selection from
one or two monosyllables.’

Janet shook her dress.

The squire replied: ‘We ‘ll take that up presently. I haven’t quite
done. Will you tell me what agent paid you the sum of money?’

‘The usual agent--a solicitor, Mr. Beltham; a gentleman whose business
lay amongst the aristocracy; he is defunct; and a very worthy old
gentleman he was, with a remarkable store of anecdotes of his patrons,
very discreetly told: for you never heard a name from him.’

‘You took him for an agent of Government, did you? why?’

‘To condense a long story, sir, the kernel of the matter is, that
almost from the hour I began to stir for the purpose of claiming my
rights--which are transparent enough this old gentleman--certainly from
no sinister motive, I may presume--commenced the payment of an annuity;
not sufficient for my necessities, possibly, but warrant of an agreeable
sort for encouraging my expectations; although oddly, this excellent old
Mr. Bannerbridge invariably served up the dish in a sauce that did not
agree with it, by advising me of the wish of the donator that I should
abandon my Case. I consequently, in common with my friends, performed
a little early lesson in arithmetic, and we came to the one conclusion
open to reflective minds--namely, that I was feared.’

My aunt Dorothy looked up for the first time.

‘Janet and I have some purchases to make,’ she said.

The squire signified sharply that she must remain where she was.

‘I think aunty wants fresh air; she had a headache last night,’ said
Janet.

I suggested that, as my presence did not seem to be required, I could
take her on my arm for a walk to the pier-head.

Her face was burning; she would gladly have gone out, but the squire
refused to permit it, and she nodded over her crossed hands, saying that
she was in no hurry.

‘Ha! I am,’ quoth he.

‘Dear Miss Beltham!’ my father ejaculated solicitously. ‘Here, sir,
oblige me by attending to me,’ cried the squire, fuming and blinking.
‘I sent for you on a piece of business. You got this money through a
gentleman, a solicitor, named Bannerbridge, did you?’

‘His name was Bannerbridge, Mr. Beltham.’

‘Dorothy, you knew a Mr. Bannerbridge?’

She faltered: ‘I knew him.... Harry was lost in the streets of London
when he was a little fellow, and the Mr. Bannerbridge I knew found him
and took him to his house, and was very kind to him.’

‘What was his Christian name?’

I gave them: ‘Charles Adolphus.’

‘The identical person!’ exclaimed my father.

‘Oh! you admit it,’ said the squire. ‘Ever seen him since the time Harry
was lost, Dorothy?’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I have heard he is dead:

‘Did you see him shortly before his death?’

‘I happened to see him a short time before!

‘He was your man of business, was he?’

‘For such little business as I had to do.’

‘You were sure you could trust him, eh?’

‘Yes.’

My aunt Dorothy breathed deeply.

‘By God, ma’am, you’re a truthful woman!’

The old man gave her a glare of admiration.

It was now my turn to undergo examination, and summoned by his
apostrophe to meet his eyes, I could appreciate the hardness of the head
I had to deal with.

‘Harry, I beg your pardon beforehand; I want to get at facts; I must ask
you what you know about where the money came from?’

I spoke of my attempts to discover the whence and wherefore of it.

‘Government? eh?’ he sneered.

‘I really can’t judge whether it came from that quarter,’ said I.

‘What do you think?--think it likely?’

I thought it unlikely, and yet likelier than that it should have come
from an individual.

‘Then you don’t suspect any particular person of having sent it in the
nick of time, Harry Richmond?’

I replied: ‘No, sir; unless you force me to suspect you.’

He jumped in his chair, astounded and wrathful, confounded me for
insinuating that he was a Bedlamite, and demanded the impudent reason of
my suspecting him to have been guilty of the infernal folly.

I had but the reason to instance that he was rich and kind at heart.

‘Rich! kind!’ he bellowed. ‘Just excuse me--I must ask for the purpose
of my inquiry;--there, tell me, how much do you believe you ‘ve got of
that money remaining? None o’ that Peterborough style of counting in the
back of your pate. Say!’

There was a dreadful silence.

My father leaned persuasively forward.

‘Mr. Beltham, I crave permission to take up the word. Allow me to remind
you of the prize Harry has won. The prince awaits you to bestow on him
the hand of his daughter--’

‘Out with it, Harry,’ shouted the squire.

‘Not to mention Harry’s seat in Parliament,’ my father resumed, ‘he has
a princess to wife, indubitably one of the most enviable positions in
the country! It is unnecessary to count on future honours; they may be
alluded to. In truth, sir, we make him the first man in the country. Not
necessarily Premier: you take my meaning: he possesses the combination
of social influence and standing with political achievements, and rank
and riches in addition--’

‘I ‘m speaking to my grandson, sir,’ the squire rejoined, shaking
himself like a man rained on. ‘I ‘m waiting for a plain answer, and no
lie. You’ve already confessed as much as that the money you told me on
your honour you put out to interest; psh!--for my grandson was smoke.
Now let’s hear him.’

My father called out: ‘I claim a hearing! The money you speak of was put
out to the very highest interest. You have your grandson in Parliament,
largely acquainted with the principal members of society, husband of
an hereditary princess! You have only at this moment to propose for her
hand. I guarantee it to you. With that money I have won him everything.
Not that I would intimate to you that princesses are purchaseable. The
point is, I knew how to employ it.’

‘In two months’ time, the money in the Funds in the boy’s name--you told
me that.’

‘You had it in the Funds in Harry Richmond’s name, sir.’

‘Well, sir, I’m asking him whether it’s in the Funds now.’

‘Oh! Mr. Beltham.’

‘What answer’s that?’

The squire was really confused by my father’s interruption, and lost
sight of me.

‘I ask where it came from: I ask whether it’s squandered?’ he continued.

‘Mr. Beltham, I reply that you have only to ask for it to have it; do so
immediately.’

‘What ‘s he saying?’ cried the baffled old man.

‘I give you a thousand times the equivalent of the money, Mr. Beltham.’

‘Is the money there?’

‘The lady is here.’

‘I said money, sir.’

‘A priceless honour and treasure, I say emphatically.’ My grandfather’s
brows and mouth were gathering for storm. Janet touched his knee.

‘Where the devil your understanding truckles, if you have any, I don’t
know,’ he muttered. ‘What the deuce--lady got to do with money!’

‘Oh!’ my father laughed lightly, ‘customarily the alliance is, they say,
as close as matrimony. Pardon me. To speak with becoming seriousness,
Mr. Beltham, it was duly imperative that our son should be known in
society, should be, you will apprehend me, advanced in station, which I
had to do through the ordinary political channel. There could not but be
a considerable expenditure for such a purpose.’

‘In Balls, and dinners!’

‘In everything that builds a young gentleman’s repute.’

‘You swear to me you gave your Balls and dinners, and the lot, for Harry
Richmond’s sake?’

‘On my veracity, I did, sir!’

‘Please don’t talk like a mountebank. I don’t want any of your
roundabout words for truth; we’re not writing a Bible essay. I try my
best to be civil.’

My father beamed on him.

‘I guarantee you succeed, sir. Nothing on earth can a man be so
absolutely sure of as to succeed in civility, if he honestly tries at
it. Jorian DeWitt,--by the way, you may not know him--an esteemed old
friend of mine, says--that is, he said once--to a tolerably impudent
fellow whom he had disconcerted with a capital retort, “You may try to
be a gentleman, and blunder at it, but if you will only try to be his
humble servant, we are certain to establish a common footing.” Jorian,
let me tell you, is a wit worthy of our glorious old days.’

My grandfather eased his heart with a plunging breath.

‘Well, sir, I didn’t ask you here for your opinion or your friend’s, and
I don’t care for modern wit.’

‘Nor I, Mr. Beltham, nor I! It has the reek of stable straw. We are of
one mind on that subject. The thing slouches, it sprawls. It--to quote
Jorian once more--is like a dirty, idle, little stupid boy who cannot
learn his lesson and plays the fool with the alphabet. You smile, Miss
Ilchester: you would appreciate Jorian. Modern wit is emphatically
degenerate. It has no scintillation, neither thrust nor parry. I compare
it to boxing, as opposed to the more beautiful science of fencing.’

‘Well, sir, I don’t want to hear your comparisons,’ growled the squire,
much oppressed. ‘Stop a minute...’

‘Half a minute to me, sir,’ said my father, with a glowing reminiscence
of Jorian DeWitt, which was almost too much for the combustible old man,
even under Janet’s admonition.

My aunt Dorothy moved her head slightly toward my father, looking on the
floor, and he at once drew in.

‘Mr. Beltham, I attend to you submissively.’

‘You do? Then tell me what brought this princess to England?’

‘The conviction that Harry had accomplished his oath to mount to an
eminence in his country, and had made the step she is about to take
less, I will say, precipitous: though I personally decline to admit a
pointed inferiority.’

‘You wrote her a letter.’

‘That, containing the news of the attack on him and his desperate
illness, was the finishing touch to the noble lady’s passion.’

‘Attack? I know nothing about an attack. You wrote her a letter and
wrote her a lie. You said he was dying.’

‘I had the boy inanimate on my breast when I despatched the epistle.’

‘You said he had only a few days to live.’

‘So in my affliction I feared.’

‘Will you swear you didn’t write that letter with the intention of
drawing her over here to have her in your power, so that you might
threaten you’d blow on her reputation if she or her father held out
against you and all didn’t go as you fished for it?’

My father raised his head proudly.

‘I divide your query into two parts. I wrote, sir, to bring her to his
side. I did not write with any intention to threaten.’

‘You’ve done it, though.’

‘I have done this,’ said my father, toweringly: ‘I have used the power
placed in my hands by Providence to overcome the hesitations of a
gentleman whose illustrious rank predisposes him to sacrifice his
daughter’s happiness to his pride of birth and station. Can any one
confute me when I assert that the princess loves Harry Richmond?’

I walked abruptly to one of the windows, hearing a pitiable wrangling on
the theme. My grandfather vowed she had grown wiser, my father
protested that she was willing and anxious; Janet was appealed to. In
a strangely-sounding underbreath, she said, ‘The princess does not wish
it.’

‘You hear that, Mr. Richmond?’ cried the squire.

He returned: ‘Can Miss Ilchester say that the Princess Ottilia does not
passionately love my son Harry Richmond? The circumstances warrant me in
beseeching a direct answer.’

She uttered: ‘No.’

I looked at her; she at me.

‘You can conduct a case, Richmond,’ the squire remarked.

My father rose to his feet. ‘I can conduct my son to happiness and
greatness, my dear sir; but to some extent I require your grandfatherly
assistance; and I urge you now to present your respects to the prince
and princess, and judge yourself of his Highness’s disposition for the
match. I assure you in advance that he welcomes the proposal.’

‘I do not believe it,’ said Janet, rising.

My aunt Dorothy followed her example, saying: ‘In justice to Harry the
proposal should be made. At least it will settle this dispute.’

Janet stared at her, and the squire threw his head back with an amazed
interjection.

‘What! You’re for it now? Why, at breakfast you were all t’ other way!
You didn’t want this meeting because you pooh-poohed the match.’

‘I do think you should go,’ she answered. ‘You have given Harry your
promise, and if he empowers you, it is right to make the proposal, and
immediately, I think.’

She spoke feverishly, with an unsweet expression of face, that seemed to
me to indicate vexedness at the squire’s treatment of my father.

‘Harry,’ she asked me in a very earnest fashion, ‘is it your desire?
Tell your grandfather that it is, and that you want to know your fate.
Why should there be any dispute on a fact that can be ascertained by
crossing a street? Surely it is trifling.’

Janet stooped to whisper in the squire’s ear.

He caught the shock of unexpected intelligence apparently; faced about,
gazed up, and cried: ‘You too! But I haven’t done here. I ‘ve got to
cross-examine... Pretend, do you mean? Pretend I’m ready to go? I can
release this prince just as well here as there.’

Janet laughed faintly.

‘I should advise your going, grandada.’

‘You a weathercock woman!’ he reproached her, quite mystified, and fell
to rubbing his head. ‘Suppose I go to be snubbed?’

‘The prince is a gentleman, grandada. Come with me. We will go alone.
You can relieve the prince, and protect him.’

My father nodded: ‘I approve.’

‘And grandada--but it will not so much matter if we are alone, though,’
Janet said.

‘Speak out.’

‘See the princess as well; she must be present.’

‘I leave it to you,’ he said, crestfallen.

Janet pressed my aunt Dorothy’s hand.

‘Aunty, you were right, you are always right. This state of suspense is
bad all round, and it is infinitely worse for the prince and princess.’

My aunt Dorothy accepted the eulogy with a singular trembling wrinkle of
the forehead.

She evidently understood that Janet had seen her wish to get released.

For my part, I shared my grandfather’s stupefaction at their
unaccountable changes. It appeared almost as if my father had won them
over to baffle him. The old man tried to insist on their sitting down
again, but Janet perseveringly smiled and smiled until he stood up.
She spoke to him softly. He was one black frown; displeased with her;
obedient, however.

Too soon after, I had the key to the enigmatical scene. At the moment I
was contemptuous of riddles, and heard with idle ears Janet’s promptings
to him and his replies. ‘It would be so much better to settle it here,’
he said. She urged that it could not be settled here without the whole
burden and responsibility falling upon him.

‘Exactly,’ interposed my father, triumphing.

Dorothy Beltham came to my side, and said, as if speaking to herself,
while she gazed out of window, ‘If a refusal, it should come from the
prince.’ She dropped her voice: ‘The money has not been spent? Has it?
Has any part of it been spent? Are you sure you have more than three
parts of it?’

Now, that she should be possessed by the spirit of parsimony on my
behalf at such a time as this, was to my conception insanely comical,
and her manner of expressing it was too much for me. I kept my laughter
under to hear her continue: ‘What numbers are flocking on the pier!
and there is no music yet. Tell me, Harry, that the money is all safe;
nearly all; it is important to know; you promised economy.’

‘Music did you speak of, Miss Beltham?’ My father bowed to her
gallantly. ‘I chanced to overhear you. My private band performs to the
public at midday.’

She was obliged to smile to excuse his interruption.

‘What’s that? whose band?’ said the squire, bursting out of Janet’s
hand. ‘A private band?’

Janet had a difficulty in resuming her command of him. The mention of
the private band made him very restive.

‘I ‘m not acting on my own judgement at all in going to these foreign
people,’ he said to Janet. ‘Why go? I can have it out here and an end to
it, without bothering them and their interpreters.’

He sang out to me: ‘Harry, do you want me to go through this form for
you?--mn’d unpleasant!’

My aunt Dorothy whispered in my ear: ‘Yes! yes!’

‘I feel tricked!’ he muttered, and did not wait for me to reply before
he was again questioning my aunt Dorothy concerning Mr. Bannerbridge,
and my father as to ‘that sum of money.’ But his method of interrogation
was confused and pointless. The drift of it was totally obscure.

‘I’m off my head to-day,’ he said to Janet, with a sideshot of his eye
at my father.

‘You waste time and trouble, grandada,’ said she.

He vowed that he was being bewildered, bothered by us all; and I thought
I had never seen him so far below his level of energy; but I had not
seen him condescend to put himself upon a moderately fair footing with
my father. The truth was, that Janet had rigorously schooled him to
bridle his temper, and he was no match for the voluble easy man without
the freest play of his tongue.

‘This prince!’ he kept ejaculating.

‘Won’t you understand, grandada, that you relieve him, and make things
clear by going?’ Janet said.

He begged her fretfully not to be impatient, and hinted that she and he
might be acting the part of dupes, and was for pursuing his inauspicious
cross-examination in spite of his blundering, and the ‘Where am I now?’
which pulled him up. My father, either talking to my aunt Dorothy, to
Janet, or to me, on ephemeral topics, scarcely noticed him, except when
he was questioned, and looked secure of success in the highest degree
consistent with perfect calmness.

‘So you say you tell me to go, do you?’ the squire called to me. ‘Be
good enough to stay here and wait. I don’t see that anything’s gained by
my going: it’s damned hard on me, having to go to a man whose language
I don’t know, and he don’t know mine, on a business we’re all of us in a
muddle about. I’ll do it if it’s right. You’re sure?’

He glanced at Janet. She nodded.

I was looking for this quaint and, to me, incomprehensible interlude
to commence with the departure of the squire and Janet, when a card was
handed in by one of the hotel-waiters.

‘Another prince!’ cried the squire. ‘These Germans seem to grow princes
like potatoes--dozens to a root! Who’s the card for? Ask him to walk up.
Show him into a quiet room. Does he speak English?’

‘Does Prince Hermann of--I can’t pronounce the name of the place--speak
English, Harry?’ Janet asked me.

‘As well as you or I,’ said I, losing my inattention all at once with a
mad leap of the heart.

Hermann’s presence gave light, fire, and colour to the scene in which
my destiny had been wavering from hand to hand without much more than
amusedly interesting me, for I was sure that I had lost Ottilia; I knew
that too well, and worse could not happen. I had besides lost other
things that used to sustain me, and being reckless, I was contemptuous,
and listened to the talk about money with sublime indifference to the
subject: with an attitude, too, I daresay. But Hermann’s name revived my
torment. Why had he come? to persuade the squire to control my father?
Nothing but that would suffer itself to be suggested, though conjectures
lying in shadow underneath pressed ominously on my mind.

My father had no doubts.

‘A word to you, Mr. Beltham, before you go to Prince Hermann. He is an
emissary, we treat him with courtesy, and if he comes to diplomatize we,
of course, give a patient hearing. I have only to observe in the most
emphatic manner possible that I do not retract one step. I will have
this marriage: I have spoken! It rests with Prince Ernest.’

The squire threw a hasty glare of his eyes back as he was hobbling on
Janet’s arm. She stopped short, and replied for him.

‘Mr. Beltham will speak for himself, in his own name. We are not
concerned in any unworthy treatment of Prince Ernest. We protest against
it.’

‘Dear young lady!’ said my father, graciously. ‘I meet you frankly. Now
tell me. I know you a gallant horsewoman: if you had lassoed the
noble horse of the desert would you let him run loose because of his
remonstrating? Side with me, I entreat you! My son is my first thought.
The pride of princes and wild horses you will find wonderfully similar,
especially in the way they take their taming when once they feel they
are positively caught. We show him we have him fast--he falls into our
paces on the spot! For Harry’s sake--for the princess’s, I beg you exert
your universally--deservedly acknowledged influence. Even now--and you
frown on me!--I cannot find it in my heart to wish you the sweet and
admirable woman of the world you are destined to be, though you would
comprehend me and applaud me, for I could not--no, not to win your
favourable opinion!--consent that you should be robbed of a single ray
of your fresh maidenly youth. If you must misjudge me, I submit. It
is the price I pay for seeing you young and lovely. Prince Ernest is,
credit me, not unworthily treated by me, if life is a battle, and the
prize of it to the General’s head. I implore you’--he lured her with
the dimple of a lurking smile--‘do not seriously blame your afflicted
senior, if we are to differ. I am vastly your elder: you instil the
doubt whether I am by as much the wiser of the two; but the father of
Harry Richmond claims to know best what will ensure his boy’s felicity.
Is he rash? Pronounce me guilty of an excessive anxiety for my son’s
welfare; say that I am too old to read the world with the accuracy of
a youthful intelligence: call me indiscreet: stigmatize me unlucky; the
severest sentence a judge’--he bowed to her deferentially--‘can utter;
only do not cast a gaze of rebuke on me because my labour is for my
son--my utmost devotion. And we know, Miss Ilchester, that the princess
honours him with her love. I protest in all candour, I treat love as
love; not as a weight in the scale; it is the heavenly power which
dispenses with weighing! its ascendancy...’

The squire could endure no more, and happily so, for my father was
losing his remarkably moderated tone, and threatening polysyllables.
He had followed Janet, step for step, at a measured distance, drooping
toward her with his winningest air, while the old man pulled at her arm
to get her out of hearing of the obnoxious flatterer. She kept her long
head in profile, trying creditably not to appear discourteous to one who
addressed her by showing an open ear, until the final bolt made by the
frenzied old man dragged her through the doorway. His neck was shortened
behind his collar as though he shrugged from the blast of a bad wind. I
believe that, on the whole, Janet was pleased. I will wager that,
left to herself, she would have been drawn into an answer, if not an
argument. Nothing would have made her resolution swerve, I admit.

They had not been out of the room three seconds when my aunt Dorothy was
called to join them. She had found time to say that she hoped the money
was intact.



CHAPTER LII. STRANGE REVELATIONS, AND MY GRANDFATHER HAS HIS LAST OUTBURST

My father and I stood at different windows, observing the unconcerned
people below.

‘Did you scheme to bring Prince Hermann over here as well?’ I asked him.

He replied laughing: ‘I really am not the wonderful wizard you think me,
Richie. I left Prince Ernest’s address as mine with Waddy in case the
Frau Feld-Marschall should take it into her head to come. Further
than that you must question Providence, which I humbly thank for its
unfailing support, down to unexpected trifles. Only this--to you and to
all of them: nothing bends me. I will not be robbed of the fruit of a
lifetime.’

‘Supposing I refuse?’

‘You refuse, Richie, to restore the princess her character and the
prince his serenity of mind at their urgent supplication? I am utterly
unable to suppose it. You are married in the papers this morning.
I grieve to say that the position of Prince Hermann is supremely
ridiculous. I am bound to add he is a bold boy. It requires courage
in one of the pretenders to the hand of the princess to undertake the
office of intercessor, for he must know--the man must know in his heart
that he is doing her no kindness. He does not appeal to me, you see. I
have shown that my arrangements are unalterable. What he will make of
your grandad!... Why on earth he should have been sent to--of all men in
the world--your grandad, Richie!’

I was invited to sympathetic smiles of shrewd amusement.

He caught sight of friends, and threw up the window, saluting them.

The squire returned with my aunt Dorothy and Janet to behold the
detested man communicating with the outer world from his own rooms. He
shouted unceremoniously, ‘Shut that window!’ and it was easy to see that
he had come back heavily armed for the offensive. ‘Here, Mr. Richmond, I
don’t want all men to know you’re in my apartments.’

‘I forgot, sir, temporarily,’ said my father, ‘I had vacated the rooms
for your convenience--be assured.’

An explanation on the subject of the rooms ensued between the old man
and the ladies;--it did not improve his temper.

His sense of breeding, nevertheless, forced him to remark, ‘I can’t
thank you, sir, for putting me under an obligation I should never have
incurred myself.’

‘Oh, I was happy to be of use to the ladies, Mr. Beltham, and require
no small coin of exchange,’ my father responded with the flourish of
a pacifying hand. ‘I have just heard from a posse of friends that
the marriage is signalled in this morning’s papers--numberless
congratulations, I need not observe.’

‘No, don’t,’ said the squire. ‘Nobody’ll understand them here, and I
needn’t ask you to sit down, because I don’t want you to stop. I’ll soon
have done now; the game’s played. Here, Harry, quick; has all that money
been spent--no offence to you, but as a matter of business?’

‘Not all, sir,’ I was able to say.

‘Half?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Three parts?’

‘It may be.’

‘And liabilities besides?’

‘There are some.’

‘You’re not a liar. That’ll do for you.’

He turned to my aunt: her eyes had shut.

‘Dorothy, you’ve sold out twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of stock.
You’re a truthful woman, as I said, and so I won’t treat you like a
witness in a box. You gave it to Harry to help him out of his scrape.
Why, short of staring lunacy, did you pass it through the hands of this
man? He sweated his thousands out of it at the start. Why did you make
a secret of it to make the man think his nonsense?--Ma’am, behave like a
lady and my daughter,’ he cried, fronting her, for the sudden and blunt
attack had slackened her nerves; she moved as though to escape, and was
bewildered. I stood overwhelmed. No wonder she had attempted to break up
the scene.

‘Tell me your object, Dorothy Beltham, in passing the money through the
hands of this man? Were you for helping him to be a man of his word?
Help the boy--that I understand. However, you were mistress of your
money! I’ve no right to complain, if you will go spending a fortune to
whitewash the blackamoor! Well, it’s your own, you’ll say. So it is: so
‘s your character!’

The egregious mildness of these interjections could not long be
preserved.

‘You deceived me, ma’am. You wouldn’t build school-houses, you couldn’t
subscribe to Charities, you acted parsimony, to pamper a scamp and his
young scholar! You went to London--you did it in cool blood; you went to
your stockbroker, and from the stockbroker to the Bank, and you sold out
stock to fling away this big sum. I went to the Bank on business, and
the books were turned over for my name, and there at “Beltham” I saw
quite by chance the cross of the pen, and I saw your folly, ma’am; I saw
it all in a shot. I went to the Bank on my own business, mind that. Ha!
you know me by this time; I loathe spying; the thing jumped out of the
book; I couldn’t help seeing. Now I don’t reckon how many positive
fools go to make one superlative humbug; you’re one of the lot, and I’ve
learnt it.’

My father airily begged leave to say: ‘As to positive and superlative,
Mr. Beltham, the three degrees of comparison are no longer of service
except to the trader. I do not consider them to exist for ladies. Your
positive is always particularly open to dispute, and I venture to assert
I cap you your superlative ten times over.’

He talked the stuff for a diversion, presenting in the midst of us an
incongruous image of smiles that filled me with I knew not what feelings
of angry alienation, until I was somewhat appeased by the idea that he
had not apprehended the nature of the words just spoken.

It seemed incredible, yet it was true; it was proved to be so to me by
his pricking his ears and his attentive look at the mention of the word
prepossessing him in relation to the money: Government.

The squire said something of Government to my aunt Dorothy, with
sarcastical emphasis.

As the observation was unnecessary, and was wantonly thrown in by
him, she seized on it to escape from her compromising silence: ‘I know
nothing of Government or its ways.’

She murmured further, and looked at Janet, who came to her aid, saying:
‘Grandada, we’ve had enough talk of money, money! All is done that you
wanted done. Stocks, Shares, Banks--we’ve gone through them all. Please,
finish! Please, do. You have only to state what you have heard from
Prince Hermann.’

Janet gazed in the direction of my father, carefully avoiding my eyes,
but evidently anxious to shield my persecuted aunty.

‘Speaking of Stocks and Shares, Miss Ilchester,’ said my father, ‘I
myself would as soon think of walking into a field of scythe-blades
in full activity as of dabbling in them. One of the few instances
I remember of our Jorian stooping to a pun, is upon the contango:
ingenious truly, but objectionable, because a pun. I shall not be guilty
of repeating it. “The stockmarket is the national snapdragon bowl,”
 he says, and is very amusing upon the Jews; whether quite fairly, Mr.
Beltham knows better than I, on my honour.’

He appealed lightly to the squire, for thus he danced on the crater’s
brink, and had for answer,

‘You’re a cool scoundrel, Richmond.’

‘I choose to respect you, rather in spite of yourself, I fear, sir,’
said my father, bracing up.

‘Did you hear my conversation with my daughter?’

‘I heard, if I may say so, the lion taking his share of it.’

‘All roaring to you, was it?’

‘Mr. Beltham, we have our little peculiarities; I am accustomed to
think of a steam-vent when I hear you indulging in a sentence of unusual
length, and I hope it is for our good, as I thoroughly believe it is for
yours, that you should deliver yourself freely.’

‘So you tell me; like a stage lacquey!’ muttered the old man, with
surprising art in caricaturing a weakness in my father’s bearing, of
which I was cruelly conscious, though his enunciation was flowing. He
lost his naturalness through forcing for ease in the teeth of insult.

‘Grandada, aunty and I will leave you,’ said Janet, waxing importunate.

‘When I’ve done,’ said he, facing his victim savagely. ‘The fellow
pretends he didn’t understand. She’s here to corroborate. Richmond,
there, my daughter, Dorothy Beltham, there’s the last of your fools and
dupes. She’s a truthful woman, I’ll own, and she’ll contradict me if
what I say is not the fact. That twenty-five thousand from “Government”
 came out of her estate.’

‘Out of--’

‘Out of be damned, sir! She’s the person who paid it.’

‘If the “damns” have set up, you may as well let the ladies go,’ said I.

He snapped at me like a rabid dog in career.

‘She’s the person--one of your petticoat “Government”--who paid--do you
hear me, Richmond?--the money to help you to keep your word: to help you
to give your Balls and dinners too. She--I won’t say she told you, and
you knew it--she paid it. She sent it through her Mr. Bannerbridge. Do
you understand now? You had it from her. My God! look at the fellow!’

A dreadful gape of stupefaction had usurped the smiles on my father’s
countenance; his eyes rolled over, he tried to articulate, and was
indeed a spectacle for an enemy. His convulsed frame rocked the
syllables, as with a groan, unpleasant to hear, he called on my aunt
Dorothy by successive stammering apostrophes to explain, spreading his
hands wide. He called out her Christian name. Her face was bloodless.

‘Address my daughter respectfully, sir, will you! I won’t have your
infernal familiarities!’ roared the squire.

‘He is my brother-in-law,’ said Dorothy, reposing on the courage of her
blood, now that the worst had been spoken. ‘Forgive me, Mr. Richmond,
for having secretly induced you to accept the loan from me.’

‘Loan!’ interjected the squire. ‘They fell upon it like a pair of kites.
You’ll find the last ghost of a bone of your loan in a bill, and well
picked. They’ve been doing their bills: I’ve heard that.’

My father touched the points of his fingers on his forehead, straining
to think, too theatrically, but in hard earnest, I believe. He seemed to
be rising on tiptoe.

‘Oh, madam! Dear lady! my friend! Dorothy, my sister! Better a thousand
times that I had married, though I shrank from a heartless union! This
money?--it is not--’

The old man broke in: ‘Are you going to be a damned low vulgar comedian
and tale of a trumpet up to the end, you Richmond? Don’t think you’ll
gain anything by standing there as if you were jumping your trunk from a
shark. Come, sir, you’re in a gentleman’s rooms; don’t pitch your voice
like a young jackanapes blowing into a horn. Your gasps and your spasms,
and howl of a yawning brute! Keep your menagerie performances for
your pantomime audiences. What are you meaning? Do you pretend you’re
astonished? She’s not the first fool of a woman whose money you’ve
devoured, with your “Madam,” and “My dear” and mouthing and elbowing
your comedy tricks; your gabble of “Government” protection, and
scandalous advertisements of the by-blow of a star-coated rapscallion.
If you’ve a recollection of the man in you, show your back, and be off,
say you’ve fought against odds--I don’t doubt you have, counting the
constables--and own you’re a villain: plead guilty, and be off and be
silent, and do no more harm. Is it “Government” still?’

My aunt Dorothy had come round to me. She clutched my arm to restrain me
from speaking, whispering:

‘Harry, you can’t save him. Think of your own head.’ She made me
irresolute, and I was too late to check my father from falling into the
trap.

‘Oh! Mr. Beltham,’ he said, ‘you are hard, sir. I put it to you: had you
been in receipt of a secret subsidy from Government for a long course of
years--’

‘How long?’ the squire interrupted.

Prompt though he would have been to dismiss the hateful person, he was
not, one could see, displeased to use the whip upon so exciteable and
responsive a frame. He seemed to me to be basely guilty of leading his
victim on to expose himself further.

‘There’s no necessity for “how long,”’ I said.

The old man kept the question on his face.

My father reflected.

‘I have to hit my memory, I am shattered, sir. I say, you would be
justified, amply justified--’

‘How long?’ was reiterated.

‘I can at least date it from the period of my marriage.’

‘From the date when your scoundrelism first touches my family, that’s to
say! So “Government” agreed to give you a stipend to support your wife!’

‘Mr. Beltham, I breathe with difficulty. It was at that period, on the
death of a nobleman interested in restraining me--I was his debtor
for kindnesses... my head is whirling! I say, at that period, upon the
recommendation of friends of high standing, I began to agitate for the
restitution of my rights. From infancy----’

‘To the deuce, your infancy! I know too much about your age. Just hark,
you Richmond! none of your “I was a child” to provoke compassion from
women. I mean to knock you down and make you incapable of hurting these
poor foreign people you trapped. They defy you, and I’ll do my best
to draw your teeth. Now for the annuity. You want one to believe ‘you
thought you frightened “Government,” eh?’

‘Annual proof was afforded me, sir.’

‘Oh! annual! through Mr. Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, deceased!’

Janet stepped up to my aunt Dorothy to persuade her to leave the room,
but she declined, and hung by me, to keep me out of danger, as she
hoped, and she prompted me with a guarding nervous squeeze of her hand
on my arm to answer temperately when I was questioned:

‘Harry, do you suspect Government paid that annuity?’

‘Not now, certainly.’

‘Tell the man who ‘tis you suspect.’

My aunt Dorothy said: ‘Harry is not bound to mention his suspicions.’

‘Tell him yourself, then.’

‘Does it matter--?’

‘Yes, it matters. I’ll break every plank he walks on, and strip him
stark till he flops down shivering into his slough--a convicted common
swindler, with his dinners and Balls and his private bands! Richmond,
you killed one of my daughters; t’ other fed you, through her agent,
this Mr. Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, from about the date of your
snaring my poor girl and carrying her off behind your postillions--your
trotting undertakers! and the hours of her life reckoned in milestones.
She’s here to contradict me, if she can. Dorothy Beltham was your
“Government” that paid the annuity.’

I took Dorothy Beltham into my arms. She was trembling excessively, yet
found time to say, ‘Bear up, dearest; keep still.’ All I thought and
felt foundered in tears.

For a while I heard little distinctly of the tremendous tirade which the
vindictive old man, rendered thrice venomous by the immobility of the
petrified large figure opposed to him, poured forth. My poor father
did not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the
torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in
the form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home
thrusts and most vehement imprecatory denunciations, that our protesting
voices quailed. Janet plucked at my aunt Dorothy’s dress to bear her
away.

‘I can’t leave my father,’ I said.

‘Nor I you, dear,’ said the tender woman; and so we remained to be
scourged by this tongue of incarnate rage.

‘You pensioner of a silly country spinster!’ sounded like a return to
mildness. My father’s chest heaved up.

I took advantage of the lull to make myself heard: I did but heap fuel
on fire, though the old man’s splenetic impetus had partly abated.

‘You Richmond! do you hear him? he swears he’s your son, and asks to
be tied to the stake beside you. Disown him, and I’ll pay you money and
thank you. I’ll thank my God for anything short of your foul blood in
the family. You married the boy’s mother to craze and kill her, and
guttle her property. You waited for the boy to come of age to swallow
what was settled on him. You wait for me to lie in my coffin to pounce
on the strongbox you think me the fool to toss to a young donkey ready
to ruin all his belongings for you! For nine-and-twenty years you’ve
sucked the veins of my family, and struck through my house like a
rotting-disease. Nine-and-twenty years ago you gave a singing-lesson in
my house: the pest has been in it ever since! You breed vermin in the
brain to think of you! Your wife, your son, your dupes, every soul that
touches you, mildews from a blight! You were born of ropery, and you
go at it straight, like a webfoot to water. What’s your boast?--your
mother’s disgrace! You shame your mother. Your whole life’s a ballad o’
bastardy. You cry up the woman’s infamy to hook at a father. You swell
and strut on her pickings. You’re a cock forced from the smoke of the
dunghill! You shame your mother, damned adventurer! You train your
boy for a swindler after your own pattern; you twirl him in your curst
harlequinade to a damnation as sure as your own. The day you crossed my
threshold the devils danced on their flooring. I’ve never seen the
sun shine fair on me after it. With your guitar under the windows, of
moonlight nights! your Spanish fopperies and trickeries! your French
phrases and toeings! I was touched by a leper. You set your traps for
both my girls: you caught the brown one first, did you, and flung her
second for t’ other, and drove a tandem of ‘em to live the spangled
hog you are; and down went the mother of the boy to the place she
liked better, and my other girl here--the one you cheated for her
salvation--you tried to cajole her from home and me, to send her the
same way down. She stuck to decency. Good Lord! you threatened to hang
yourself, guitar and all. But her purse served your turn. For why? You
‘re a leech. I speak before ladies or I’d rip your town-life to shreds.
Your cause! your romantic history! your fine figure! every inch of you
‘s notched with villany! You fasten on every moneyed woman that comes in
your way. You’ve outdone Herod in murdering the innocents, for he didn’t
feed on ‘em, and they’ve made you fat. One thing I’ll say of you: you
look the beastly thing you set yourself up for. The kindest blow to you
‘s to call you impostor.’

He paused, but his inordinate passion of speech was unsated: his white
lips hung loose for another eruption.

I broke from my aunt Dorothy to cross over to my father, saying on
the way: ‘We ‘ve heard enough, sir. You forget the cardinal point of
invective, which is, not to create sympathy for the person you assail.’

‘Oh! you come in with your infernal fine language, do you!’ the old man
thundered at me. ‘I ‘ll just tell you at once, young fellow--’

My aunt Dorothy supplicated his attention. ‘One error I must correct.’
Her voice issued from a contracted throat, and was painfully thin
and straining, as though the will to speak did violence to her weaker
nature. ‘My sister loved Mr. Richmond. It was to save her life, because
I believed she loved him much and would have died, that Mr. Richmond--in
pity--offered her his hand, at my wish’: she bent her head: ‘at my cost.
It was done for me. I wished it; he obeyed me. No blame--’ her dear
mouth faltered. ‘I am to be accused, if anybody.’

She added more firmly: ‘My money would have been his. I hoped to spare
his feelings, I beg his forgiveness now, by devoting some of it, unknown
to him, to assist him. That was chiefly to please myself, I see, and I
am punished.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ said the squire, calm at white heat; ‘a fool’s confession
ought to be heard out to the end. What about the twenty-five thousand?’

‘I hoped to help my Harry.’

‘Why didn’t you do it openly?’

She breathed audible long breaths before she could summon courage to
say: ‘His father was going to make an irreparable sacrifice. I feared
that if he knew this money came from me he would reject it, and
persist.’

Had she disliked the idea of my father’s marrying?

The old man pounced on the word sacrifice. ‘What sacrifice, ma’am?
What’s the sacrifice?’

I perceived that she could not without anguish, and perhaps peril of a
further exposure, bring herself to speak, and explained: ‘It relates to
my having tried to persuade my father to marry a very wealthy lady, so
that he might produce the money on the day appointed. Rail at me, sir,
as much as you like. If you can’t understand the circumstances without a
chapter of statements, I’m sorry for you. A great deal is due to you, I
know; but I can’t pay a jot of it while you go on rating my father like
a madman.’

‘Harry!’ either my aunt or Janet breathed a warning.

I replied that I was past mincing phrases. The folly of giving the
tongue an airing was upon me: I was in fact invited to continue, and
animated to do it thoroughly, by the old man’s expression of face, which
was that of one who says, ‘I give you rope,’ and I dealt him a liberal
amount of stock irony not worth repeating; things that any cultivated
man in anger can drill and sting the Boeotian with, under the delusion
that he has not lost a particle of his self-command because of his
coolness. I spoke very deliberately, and therefore supposed that the
words of composure were those of prudent sense. The error was manifest.
The women saw it. One who has indulged his soul in invective will not,
if he has power in his hand, be robbed of his climax with impunity by a
cool response that seems to trifle, and scourges.

I wound up by thanking my father for his devotion to me: I deemed it, I
said, excessive and mistaken in the recent instance, but it was for me.

Upon this he awoke from his dreamy-looking stupefaction.

‘Richie does me justice. He is my dear boy. He loves me: I love him.
None can cheat us of that. He loves his wreck of a father. You have
struck me to your feet, Mr. Beltham.’

‘I don’t want to see you there, sir; I want to see you go, and not
stand rapping your breast-bone, sounding like a burst drum, as you are,’
retorted the unappeasable old man.

I begged him in exasperation to keep his similes to himself.

Janet and my aunt Dorothy raised their voices.

My father said: ‘I am broken.’

He put out a swimming hand that trembled when it rested, like that of an
aged man grasping a staff. I feared for a moment he was acting, he spoke
so like himself, miserable though he appeared: but it was his well-known
native old style in a state of decrepitude.

‘I am broken,’ he repeated. ‘I am like the ancient figure of mortality
entering the mouth of the tomb on a sepulchral monument, somewhere, by
a celebrated sculptor: I have seen it: I forget the city. I shall
presently forget names of men. It is not your abuse, Mr. Beltham. I
should have bowed my head to it till the storm passed. Your facts... Oh!
Miss Beltham, this last privilege to call you dearest of human beings!
my benefactress! my blessing! Do not scorn me, madam.’

‘I never did; I never will; I pitied you,’ she cried, sobbing.

The squire stamped his foot.

‘Madam,’ my father bowed gently. ‘I was under heaven’s special
protection--I thought so. I feel I have been robbed--I have not deserved
it! Oh! madam, no: it was your generosity that I did not deserve. One
of the angels of heaven persuaded me to trust in it. I did not know....
Adieu, madam. May I be worthy to meet you!--Ay, Mr. Beltham, your facts
have committed the death-wound. You have taken the staff out of my
hand: you have extinguished the light. I have existed--ay, a pensioner,
unknowingly, on this dear lady’s charity; to her I say no more. To you,
sir, by all that is most sacred to a man-by the ashes of my mother! by
the prospects of my boy! I swear the annuity was in my belief a tangible
token that my claims to consideration were in the highest sources
acknowledged to be just. I cannot speak! One word to you, Mr. Beltham:
put me aside, I am nothing:--Harry Richmond!--his fortunes are not
lost; he has a future! I entreat you--he is your grandson--give him
your support; go this instant to the prince--no! you will not deny
your countenance to Harry Richmond: let him abjure my name; let me be
nameless in his house. And I promise you I shall be unheard of both in
Christendom and Heathendom: I have no heart except for my boy’s nuptials
with the princess: this one thing, to see him the husband of the fairest
and noblest lady upon earth, with all the life remaining in me I pray
for! I have won it for him. I have a moderate ability, immense devotion.
I declare to you, sir, I have lived, actually subsisted, on this hope!
and I have directed my efforts incessantly, sleeplessly, to fortify it.
I die to do it! I implore you, sir, go to the prince. If I’ (he said
this touchingly) ‘if I am any further in anybody’s way, it is only as a
fallen tree.’ But his inveterate fancifulness led him to add: ‘And that
may bridge a cataract.’

My grandfather had been clearing his throat two or three times.

‘I ‘m ready to finish and get rid of you, Richmond.’

My father bowed.

‘I am gone, sir. I feel I am all but tongue-tied. Think that it is Harry
who petitions you to ensure his happiness. To-day I guarantee-it.’

The old man turned an inquiring eyebrow upon me. Janet laid her hand
on him. He dismissed the feline instinct to prolong our torture, and
delivered himself briskly.

‘Richmond, your last little bit of villany ‘s broken in the egg. I
separate the boy from you: he’s not your accomplice there, I’m glad
to know. You witched the lady over to pounce on her like a fowler, you
threatened her father with a scandal, if he thought proper to force the
trap; swore you ‘d toss her to be plucked by the gossips, eh? She’s free
of you! You got your English and your Germans here to point their
bills, and stretch their necks, and hiss, if this gentleman--and your
newspapers!--if he didn’t give up to you like a funky traveller to a
highwayman. I remember a tale of a clumsy Turpin, who shot himself when
he was drawing the pistol out of his holsters to frighten the money-bag
out of a market farmer. You’ve done about the same, you Richmond; and,
of all the damned poor speeches I ever heard from a convicted felon,
yours is the worst--a sheared sheep’d ha’ done it more respectably,
grant the beast a tongue! The lady is free of you, I tell you. Harry has
to thank you for that kindness. She--what is it, Janet? Never mind, I’ve
got the story--she didn’t want to marry; but this prince, who called on
me just now, happened to be her father’s nominee, and he heard of your
scoundrelism, and he behaved like a man and a gentleman, and offered
himself, none too early nor too late, as it turns out; and the princess,
like a good girl, has made amends to her father by accepting him. I’ve
the word of this Prince Hermann for it. Now you can look upon a game of
stale-mate. If I had gone to the prince, it wouldn’t have been to back
your play; but, if you hadn’t been guilty of the tricks of a blackguard
past praying for, this princess would never have been obliged to marry
a man to protect her father and herself. They sent him here to stop any
misunderstanding. He speaks good English, so that’s certain. Your
lies will be contradicted, every one of ‘em, seriatim, in to-morrow’s
newspapers, setting the real man in place of the wrong one; and you ‘ll
draw no profit from them in your fashionable world, where you ‘ve been
grinning lately, like a blackamoor’s head on a conjuror’s plate--the
devil alone able to account for the body and joinings. Now you can be
off.’

I went up to my father. His plight was more desperate than mine, for
I had resembled the condemned before the firing-party, to whom the
expected bullet brings a merely physical shock. He, poor man, heard
his sentence, which is the heart’s pang of death; and how fondly and
rootedly he had clung to the idea of my marriage with the princess was
shown in his extinction after this blow.

My grandfather chose the moment as a fitting one to ask me for the last
time to take my side.

I replied, without offence in the tones of my voice, that I thought my
father need not lose me into the bargain, after what he had suffered
that day.

He just as quietly rejoined with a recommendation to me to divorce
myself for good and all from a scoundrel.

I took my father’s arm: he was not in a state to move away unsupported.

My aunt Dorothy stood weeping; Janet was at the window, no friend to
either of us.

I said to her, ‘You have your wish.’

She shook her head, but did not look back.

My grandfather watched me, step by step, until I had reached the door.

‘You’re going, are you?’ he said. ‘Then I whistle you off my fingers!’

An attempt to speak was made by my father in the doorway. He bowed wide
of the company, like a blind man. I led him out.

Dimness of sight spared me from seeing certain figures, which were at
the toll-bar of the pier, on the way to quit our shores. What I heard
was not of a character to give me faith in the sanity of the companion I
had chosen. He murmured it at first to himself:

‘Waddy shall have her monument!’

My patience was not proof against the repetition of it aloud to me. Had
I been gentler I might have known that his nature was compelled to look
forward to something, and he discerned nothing in the future, save the
task of raising a memorial to a faithful servant.



CHAPTER LIII. THE HEIRESS PROVES THAT SHE INHERITS THE FEUD AND I GO DRIFTING

My grandfather lived eight months after a scene that had afforded him
high gratification at the heaviest cost a plain man can pay for his
pleasures: it killed him.

My father’s supple nature helped him to survive it in apparently
unimpeded health, so that the world might well suppose him
unconquerable, as he meant that it should. But I, who was with him,
knew, though he never talked of his wounds, they had been driven into
his heart. He collapsed in speech, and became what he used to call ‘one
of the ordinary nodding men,’ forsaken of his swamping initiative. I
merely observed him; I did not invite his confidences, being myself in
no mood to give sympathy or to receive it. I was about as tender in my
care of him as a military escort bound to deliver up a captive alive.

I left him at Bulsted on my way to London to face the creditors.
Adversity had not lowered the admiration of the captain and his wife for
the magnificent host of those select and lofty entertainments which I
was led by my errand to examine in the skeleton, and with a wonder
as big as theirs, but of another complexion: They hung about him, and
perused and petted him quaintly; it was grotesque; they thought him
deeply injured: by what, by whom, they could not say; but Julia was
disappointed in me for refraining to come out with a sally on his
behalf. He had quite intoxicated their imaginations. Julia told me of
the things he did not do as marvellingly as of the things he did or had
done; the charm, it seemed, was to find herself familiar with him to
the extent of all but nursing him and making him belong to her. Pilgrims
coming upon the source of the mysteriously-abounding river, hardly
revere it the less because they love it more when they behold the
babbling channels it issues from; and the sense of possession is the
secret, I suppose. Julia could inform me rapturously that her charge had
slept eighteen hours at a spell. His remarks upon the proposal to fetch
a doctor, feeble in themselves, were delicious to her, because they
recalled his old humour to show his great spirit, and from her and from
Captain William in turn I was condemned to hear how he had said this and
that of the doctor, which in my opinion might have been more concise.
‘Really, deuced good indeed!’ Captain William would exclaim. ‘Don’t you
see it, Harry, my boy? He denies the doctor has a right to cast him out
of the world on account of his having been the official to introduce
him, and he’ll only consent to be visited when he happens to be as
incapable of resisting as upon their very first encounter.’

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had
been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their
echoes.

He and Julia fancied me cold to my father’s merits. Fond as they were
of the squire, they declared war against him in private, they criticized
Janet, they thought my aunt Dorothy slightly wrong in making a secret of
her good deed: my father was the victim. Their unabated warmth consoled
me in the bitterest of seasons. He found a home with them at a time when
there would have been a battle at every step. The world soon knew that
my grandfather had cast me off, and with this foundation destroyed, the
entire fabric of the Grand Parade fell to the ground at once. The crash
was heavy. Jorian DeWitt said truly that what a man hates in adversity
is to see ‘faces’; meaning that the humanity has gone out of them in
their curious observation of you under misfortune. You see neither
friends nor enemies. You are too sensitive for friends, and are blunted
against enemies. You see but the mask of faces: my father was sheltered
from that. Julia consulted his wishes in everything; she set traps to
catch his whims, and treated them as birds of paradise; she could submit
to have the toppling crumpled figure of a man, Bagenhope, his pensioner
and singular comforter, in her house. The little creature was fetched
out of his haunts in London purposely to soothe my father with
performances on his ancient clarionet, a most querulous plaintive
instrument in his discoursing, almost the length of himself; and she
endured the nightly sound of it in the guest’s blue bedroom, heroically
patient, a model to me. Bagenhope drank drams: she allowanced him. He
had known my father’s mother, and could talk of her in his cups: his
playing, and his aged tunes, my father said, were a certification to
him that he was at the bottom of the ladder. Why that should afford him
peculiar comfort, none of us could comprehend. ‘He was the humble lover
of my mother, Richie,’ I heard with some confusion, and that he adored
her memory. The statement was part of an entreaty to me to provide
liberally for Bagenhope’s pension before we quitted England. ‘I am
not seriously anxious for much else,’ said my father. Yet was he fully
conscious of the defeat he had sustained and the catastrophe he had
brought down upon me: his touch of my hand told me that, and his desire
for darkness and sleep. He had nothing to look to, nothing to see
twinkling its radiance for him in the dim distance now; no propitiating
Government, no special Providence. But he never once put on a sorrowful
air to press for pathos, and I thanked him. He was a man endowed to
excite it in the most effective manner, to a degree fearful enough to
win English sympathies despite his un-English faults. He could have
drawn tears in floods, infinite pathetic commiseration, from our
grangousier public, whose taste is to have it as it may be had to the
mixture of one-third of nature in two-thirds of artifice. I believe he
was expected to go about with this beggar’s petition for compassion, and
it was a disappointment to the generous, for which they punished him,
that he should have abstained. And moreover his simple quietude was
really touching to true-hearted people. The elements of pathos do not
permit of their being dispensed from a stout smoking bowl. I have to
record no pathetic field-day. My father was never insincere in emotion.

I spared his friends, chums, associates, excellent men of a kind, the
trial of their attachment by shunning them. His servants I dismissed
personally, from M. Alphonse down to the coachman Jeremy, whose speech
to me was, that he should be happy to serve my father again, or me, if
he should happen to be out of a situation when either of us wanted him,
which at least showed his preference for employment: on the other hand,
Alphonse, embracing the grand extremes of his stereotyped national
oratory, where ‘SI JAMAIS,’ like the herald Mercury new-mounting, takes
its august flight to set in the splendour of ‘ausqu’n LA MORT,’ declared
all other service than my father’s repugnant, and vowed himself to a
hermitage, remote from condiments. They both meant well, and did
but speak the diverse language of their blood. Mrs. Waddy withdrew a
respited heart to Dipwell; it being, according to her experiences, the
third time that my father had relinquished house and furniture to go
into eclipse on the Continent after blazing over London. She strongly
recommended the Continent for a place of restoration, citing his
likeness to that animal the chameleon, in the readiness with which he
forgot himself among them that knew nothing of him. We quitted Bulsted
previous to the return of the family to Riversley. My grandfather lay
at the island hotel a month, and was brought home desperately ill.
Lady Edbury happened to cross the channel with us. She behaved badly,
I thought; foolishly, my father said. She did as much as obliqueness of
vision and sharpness of feature could help her to do to cut him in the
presence of her party: and he would not take nay. It seemed in very bad
taste on his part; he explained to me off-handedly that he insisted upon
the exchange of a word or two for the single purpose of protecting her
from calumny. By and by it grew more explicable to me how witless she
had been to give gossip a handle in the effort to escape it. She sent
for him in Paris, but he did not pay the visit.

My grandfather and I never saw one another again. He had news of me from
various quarters, and I of him from one; I was leading a life in marked
contrast from the homely Riversley circle of days: and this likewise
was set in the count of charges against my father. Our Continental
pilgrimage ended in a course of riotousness that he did not participate
in, and was entirely innocent of, but was held accountable for, because
he had been judged a sinner.

‘I am ordered to say,’ Janet wrote, scrupulously obeying the order,
‘that if you will leave Paris and come home, and not delay in doing it,
your grandfather will receive you on the same footing as heretofore.’

As heretofore! in a letter from a young woman supposed to nourish a
softness!

I could not leave my father in Paris, alone; I dared not bring him to
London. In wrath at what I remembered, I replied that I was willing to
return to Riversley if my father should find a welcome as well.

Janet sent a few dry lines to summon me over in April, a pleasant month
on heath-lands when the Southwest sweeps them. The squire was dead. I
dropped my father at Bulsted. I could have sworn to the terms of the
Will; Mr. Burgin had little to teach me. Janet was the heiress; three
thousand pounds per annum fell to the lot of Harry Lepel Richmond, to
be paid out of the estate, and pass in reversion to his children, or to
Janet’s should the aforesaid Harry die childless.

I was hard hit, and chagrined, but I was not at all angry, for I knew
what the Will meant. My aunt Dorothy supplied the interlining eagerly
to mollify the seeming cruelty. ‘You have only to ask to have it all,
Harry.’ The sturdy squire had done his utmost to forward his cherished
wishes after death. My aunt received five-and-twenty thousand pounds,
the sum she had thrown away. ‘I promised that no money of mine should go
where the other went,’ she said.

The surprise in store for me was to find how much this rough-worded old
man had been liked by his tenantry, his agents and servants. I spoke of
it to Janet. ‘They loved him,’ she said. ‘No one who ever met him fairly
could help loving him.’ They followed him to his grave in a body. From
what I chanced to hear among them, their squire was the man of their
hearts: in short, an Englishman of the kind which is perpetually
perishing out of the land. Janet expected me to be enthusiastic
likewise, or remorseful. She expected sympathy; she read me the long
list of his charities. I was reminded of Julia Bulsted commenting on
my father, with her this he did and that. ‘He had plenty,’ I said, and
Janet shut her lips. Her coldness was irritating.

What ground of accusation had she against me? Our situation had become
so delicate that a cold breath sundered us as far as the Poles. I was
at liberty to suspect that now she was the heiress, her mind was simply
obedient to her grandada’s wish; but, as I told my aunt Dorothy, I would
not do her that injustice.

‘No,’ said Dorothy; ‘it is the money that makes her position so
difficult, unless you break the ice.’

I urged that having steadily refused her before, I could hardly advance
without some invitation now.

‘What invitation?’ said my aunt.

‘Not a corpse-like consent,’ said I.

‘Harry,’ she twitted me, ‘you have not forgiven her.’ That was true.

Sir Roderick and Lady Ilchester did not conceal their elation at their
daughter’s vast inheritance, though the lady appealed to my feelings in
stating that her son Charles was not mentioned in the Will. Sir Roderick
talked of the squire with personal pride:--‘Now, as to his management
of those unwieldy men, his miners they sent him up the items of their
complaints. He took them one by one, yielding here, discussing there,
and holding to his point. So the men gave way; he sent them a month’s
pay to reward them for their good sense. He had the art of moulding the
men who served him in his own likeness. His capacity for business was
extraordinary; you never expected it of a country gentleman. He more
than quadrupled his inheritance--much more!’ I state it to the worthy
Baronet’s honour, that although it would have been immensely to his
satisfaction to see his daughter attracting the suitor proper to an
heiress of such magnitude, he did not attempt to impose restriction upon
my interviews with Janet: Riversley was mentioned as my home. I tried to
feel at home; the heir of the place seemed foreign, and so did Janet.
I attributed it partly to her deep mourning dress that robed her in so
sedate a womanliness, partly, in spite of myself, to her wealth.

‘Speak to her kindly of your grandfather,’ said my aunt Dorothy. To
do so, however, as she desired it, would be to be guilty of a form of
hypocrisy, and I belied my better sentiments by keeping silent. Thus,
having ruined myself through anger, I allowed silly sensitiveness to
prevent the repair.

It became known that my father was at Bulsted.

I saw trouble one morning on Janet’s forehead.

We had a conversation that came near to tenderness; at last she said:
‘Will you be able to forgive me if I have ever the misfortune to offend
you?’

‘You won’t offend me,’ said I.

She hoped not.

I rallied her: ‘Tut, tut, you talk like any twelve-years-old, Janet.’

‘I offended you then!’

‘Every day! it’s all that I care much to remember.’

She looked pleased, but I was so situated that I required passion and
abandonment in return for a confession damaging to my pride. Besides,
the school I had been graduating in of late unfitted me for a young
English gentlewoman’s shades and intervolved descents of emotion. A
glance up and a dimple in the cheek, were pretty homely things enough,
not the blaze I wanted to unlock me, and absolutely thought I had
deserved.

Sir Roderick called her to the library on business, which he was in
the habit of doing ten times a day, as well as of discussing matters of
business at table, ostentatiously consulting his daughter, with a solemn
countenance and a transparently reeling heart of parental exultation.
‘Janet is supreme,’ he would say: ‘my advice is simple advice; I am
her chief agent, that is all.’ Her chief agent, as director of three
Companies and chairman of one, was perhaps competent to advise her,
he remarked. Her judgement upon ordinary matters he agreed with my
grandfather in thinking consummate.

Janet went to him, and shortly after drove him to the station for
London. My aunt Dorothy had warned me that she was preparing some deed
in my favour, and as I fancied her father to have gone to London for
that purpose, and supposed she would now venture to touch on it, I
walked away from the East gates of the park as soon as I heard the trot
of her ponies, and was led by an evil fate (the stuff the fates are
composed of in my instance I have not kept secret) to walk Westward.
Thither my evil fate propelled me, where accident was ready to espouse
it and breed me mortifications innumerable. My father chanced to have
heard the particulars of Squire Beltham’s will that morning: I believe
Captain William’s coachman brushed the subject despondently in my
interests; it did not reach him through Julia.

He stood outside the Western gates, and as I approached, I could
perceive a labour of excitement on his frame. He pulled violently at the
bars of the obstruction.

‘Richie, I am interdicted house and grounds!’ he called, and waved his
hand toward the lodge: ‘they decline to open to me.’

‘Were you denied admission?’ I asked him.

‘--Your name, if you please, sir?--Mr. Richmond Roy.--We are sorry we
have orders not to admit you. And they declined; they would not admit me
to see my son.’

‘Those must be the squire’s old orders,’ I said, and shouted to the
lodge-keeper.

My father, with the forethoughtfulness which never forsook him, stopped
me.

‘No, Richie, no; the good woman shall not have the responsibility of
letting me in against orders; she may be risking her place, poor soul!
Help me, dear lad.’

He climbed the bars to the spikes, tottering, and communicating a
convulsion to me as I assisted him in the leap down: no common feat for
one of his age and weight.

He leaned on me, quaking.

‘Impossible! Richie, impossible!’ he cried, and reviewed a series of
interjections.

It was some time before I discovered that they related to the Will. He
was frenzied, and raved, turning suddenly from red to pale under what I
feared were redoubtable symptoms, physical or mental. He came for sight
of the Will; he would contest it, overthrow it. Harry ruined? He would
see Miss Beltham and fathom the plot;--angel, he called her, and
was absurdly exclamatory, but in dire earnest. He must have had the
appearance of a drunken man to persons observing him from the Grange
windows.

My father was refused admission at the hall-doors.

The butler, the brute Sillabin, withstood me impassively.

Whose orders had he?

Miss Ilchester’s.

‘They are afraid of me!’ my father thundered.

I sent a message to Janet.

She was not long in coming, followed by a footman who handed a twist
of note-paper from my aunt Dorothy to my father. He opened it and made
believe to read it, muttering all the while of the Will.

Janet dismissed the men-servants. She was quite colourless.

‘We have been stopped in the doorway,’ I said.

She answered: ‘I wish it could have been prevented.’

‘You take it on yourself, then?’

She was inaudible.

‘My dear Janet, you call Riversley my home, don’t you?’

‘It is yours.’

‘Do you intend to keep up this hateful feud now my grandfather is dead?’

‘No, Harry, not I.’

‘Did you give orders to stop my father from entering the house and
grounds?’

‘I did.’

‘You won’t have him here?’

‘Dear Harry, I hoped he would not come just yet.’

‘But you gave the orders?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re rather incomprehensible, my dear Janet.’

‘I wish you could understand me, Harry.’

‘You arm your servants against him!’

‘In a few days--’ she faltered.

‘You insult him and me now,’ said I, enraged at the half indication of
her relenting, which spoiled her look of modestly--resolute beauty, and
seemed to show that she meant to succumb without letting me break her.
‘You are mistress of the place.’

‘I am. I wish I were not.’

‘You are mistress of Riversley, and you refuse to let my father come
in!’

‘While I am the mistress, yes.’

‘Anywhere but here, Harry! If he will see me or aunty, if he will kindly
appoint any other place, we will meet him, we shall be glad.’

‘I request you to let him enter the house. Do you consent or not?’

‘He was refused once at these doors. Do you refuse him a second time?’

‘I do.’

‘You mean that?’

‘I am obliged to.’

‘You won’t yield a step to me?’

‘I cannot.’

The spirit of an armed champion was behind those mild features, soft
almost to supplication to me, that I might know her to be under a
constraint. The nether lip dropped in breathing, the eyes wavered: such
was her appearance in open war with me, but her will was firm.

Of course I was not so dense as to be unable to perceive her grounds for
refusing.

She would not throw the burden on her grandada, even to propitiate
me--the man she still loved.

But that she should have a reason, and think it good, in spite of me,
and cling to it, defying me, and that she should do hurt to a sentient
human creature, who was my father, for the sake of blindly obeying to
the letter the injunction of the dead, were intolerable offences to me
and common humanity. I, for my own part, would have forgiven her, as I
congratulated myself upon reflecting. It was on her account--to open
her mind, to enlighten her concerning right and wrong determination, to
bring her feelings to bear upon a crude judgement--that I condescended
to argue the case. Smarting with admiration, both of the depths and
shallows of her character, and of her fine figure, I began:--She was
to consider how young she was to pretend to decide on the balance of
duties, how little of the world she had seen; an oath sworn at the
bedside of the dead was a solemn thing, but was it Christian to keep
it to do an unnecessary cruelty to the living? if she had not studied
philosophy, she might at least discern the difference between just
resolves and insane--between those the soul sanctioned, and those
hateful to nature; to bind oneself to carry on another person’s
vindictiveness was voluntarily to adopt slavery; this was flatly-avowed
insanity, and so forth, with an emphatic display of patience.

The truth of my words could not be controverted. Unhappily I confounded
right speaking with right acting, and conceived, because I spoke so
justly, that I was specially approved in pressing her to yield.

She broke the first pause to say, ‘It’s useless, Harry. I do what I
think I am bound to do.’

‘Then I have spoken to no purpose!’

‘If you will only be kind, and wait two or three days?’

‘Be sensible!’

‘I am, as much as I can be.’

‘Hard as a flint--you always were! The most grateful woman alive, I
admit. I know not another, I assure you, Janet, who, in return for
millions of money, would do such a piece of wanton cruelty. What! You
think he was not punished enough when he was berated and torn to shreds
in your presence? They would be cruel, perhaps--we will suppose it of
your sex--but not so fond of their consciences as to stamp a life out to
keep an oath. I forget the terms of the Will. Were you enjoined in it to
force him away?’

My father had stationed himself in the background. Mention of the
Will caught his ears, and he commenced shaking my aunt Dorothy’s note,
blinking and muttering at a great rate, and pressing his temples.

‘I do not read a word of this,’ he said,--‘upon my honour, not a word;
and I know it is her handwriting. That Will!--only, for the love of
heaven, madam,’--he bowed vaguely to Janet ‘not a syllable of this to
the princess, or we are destroyed. I have a great bell in my head, or I
would say more. Hearing is out of the question.’

Janet gazed piteously from him to me.

To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common.

I begged my father to walk along the carriage-drive. He required that
the direction should be pointed out accurately, and promptly obeyed me,
saying: ‘I back you, remember. I should certainly be asleep now but for
this extraordinary bell.’ After going some steps, he turned to shout
‘Gong,’ and touched his ear. He walked loosely, utterly unlike the walk
habitual to him even recently in Paris.

‘Has he been ill?’ Janet asked.

‘He won’t see the doctor; the symptoms threaten apoplexy or paralysis,
I ‘m told. Let us finish. You were aware that you were to inherit
Riversley?’

‘Yes, Riversley, Harry; I knew that; I knew nothing else.’

‘The old place was left to you that you might bar my father out?’

‘I gave my word.’

‘You pledged it--swore?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you’ve done your worst, my dear. If the axe were to fall on your
neck for it, you would still refuse, would you not?’

Janet answered softly: ‘I believe so.’

‘Then, good-bye,’ said I.

That feminine softness and its burden of unalterable firmness pulled me
two ways, angering me all the more that I should feel myself susceptible
to a charm which came of spiritual rawness rather than sweetness; for
she needed not to have made the answer in such a manner; there was pride
in it; she liked the soft sound of her voice while declaring herself
invincible: I could see her picturing herself meek but fixed.

‘Will you go, Harry? Will you not take Riversley?’ she said.

I laughed.

‘To spare you the repetition of the dilemma?’

‘No, Harry; but this might be done.’

‘But--my fullest thanks to you for your generosity: really! I speak in
earnest: it would be decidedly against your grandada’s wishes, seeing
that he left the Grange to you, and not to me.’

‘Grandada’s wishes! I cannot carry out all his wishes,’ she sighed.

‘Are you anxious to?’

We were on the delicate ground, as her crimson face revealed to me that
she knew as well as I.

I, however, had little delicacy in leading her on it. She might well
feel that she deserved some wooing.

I fancied she was going to be overcome, going to tremble and show
herself ready to fall on my bosom, and I was uncertain of the amount of
magnanimity in store there.

She replied calmly, ‘Not immediately.’

‘You are not immediately anxious to fulfil his wishes?’

‘Harry, I find it hard to do those that are thrust on me.’

‘But, as a matter of serious obligation, you would hold yourself bound
by and by to perform them all?’

‘I cannot speak any further of my willingness, Harry.’

‘The sense of duty is evidently always sufficient to make you act upon
the negative--to deny, at least?’

‘Yes, I daresay,’ said Janet.

We shook hands like a pair of commercial men.

I led my father to Bulsted. He was too feverish to remain there. In the
evening, after having had a fruitless conversation with my aunt Dorothy
upon the event of the day, I took him to London that he might visit
his lawyers, who kindly consented to treat him like doctors, when I had
arranged to make over to them three parts of my annuity, and talked of
his Case encouragingly; the effect of which should not have astonished
me. He closed a fit of reverie resembling his drowsiness, by exclaiming:
‘Richie will be indebted to his dad for his place in the world after
all!’ Temporarily, he admitted, we must be fugitives from creditors, and
as to that eccentric tribe, at once so human and so inhuman, he imparted
many curious characteristics gained of his experience. Jorian DeWitt had
indeed compared them to the female ivy that would ultimately kill its
tree, but inasmuch as they were parasites, they loved their debtor; he
was life and support to them, and there was this remarkable fact about
them: by slipping out of their clutches at critical moments when they
would infallibly be pulling you down, you were enabled to return to them
fresh, and they became inspired with another lease of lively faith in
your future: et caetera. I knew the language. It was a flash of himself,
and a bad one, but I was not the person whom he meant to deceive with
it. He was soon giving me other than verbal proof out of England that
he was not thoroughly beaten. We had no home in England. At an hotel in
Vienna, upon the close of the aristocratic season there, he renewed
an acquaintance with a Russian lady, Countess Kornikoff, and he and I
parted. She disliked the Margravine of Rippau, who was in Vienna,
and did not recognize us. I heard that it was the Margravine who had
despatched Prince Hermann to England as soon as she discovered Ottilia’s
flight thither. She commissioned him to go straightway to Roy in London,
and my father’s having infatuatedly left his own address for Prince
Ernest’s in the island, brought Hermann down: he only met Eckart in the
morning train. I mention it to show the strange working of events.

Janet sent me a letter by the hands of Temple in August. It was
moderately well written for so blunt a writer, and might have touched me
but for other news coming simultaneously that shook the earth under my
feet.

She begged my forgiveness for her hardness, adding characteristically
that she could never have acted in any other manner. The delusion, that
what she was she must always be, because it was her nature, had
mastered her understanding, or rather it was one of the doors of her
understanding not yet opened: she had to respect her grandada’s wishes.
She made it likewise appear that she was ready for further sacrifices to
carry out the same.

‘At least you will accept a division of the property, Harry. It should
be yours. It is an excess, and I feel it a snare to me. I was a selfish
child: I may not become an estimable woman. You have not pardoned my
behaviour at the island last year, and I cannot think I was wrong:
perhaps I might learn: I want your friendship and counsel. Aunty
will live with me: she says that you would complete us. At any rate
I transfer Riversley to you. Send me your consent. Papa will have it
before the transfer is signed.’

The letter ended with an adieu, a petition for an answer, and ‘yours
affectionately.’

On the day of its date, a Viennese newspaper lying on the Salzburg Hotel
table chronicled Ottilia’s marriage with Prince Hermann.

I turned on Temple to walk him off his legs if I could.

Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased not to sit down in
sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the
soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and
infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks;
taste danger, sweat, earn rest: learn to discover ungrudgingly that
haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest
is your uttermost reward. Would you know what it is to hope again, and
have all your hopes at hand?--hang upon the crags at a gradient: that
makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing
you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like
flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient: if
just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. How the old lax life
closes in about you there! You are the man of your faculties, nothing
more. Why should a man pretend to more? We ask it wonderingly when we
are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the
joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical
herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall
to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed
crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand
to the mountain kine.



CHAPTER LIV. MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in love with the East,
until it began to consume me. History, like the air we breathe, must
be in motion to keep us uncorrupt: otherwise its ancient homes are
infectious. My passion for the sun and his baked people lasted awhile,
the drudgery of the habit of voluntary exile some time longer, and then,
quite unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so violent that
I abandoned a correspondence of several months, lying for me both at
Damascus and Cairo, to catch the boat for Europe. A dream of a rainy
morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have been the origin
of the wild craving I had for my native land and Janet. The moist air
of flying showers and drenched spring buds surrounded her; I saw her
plainly lifting a rose’s head; was it possible I had ever refused to be
her yokefellow? Could so noble a figure of a fair young woman have been
offered and repudiated again and again by a man in his senses? I spurned
the intolerable idiot, to stop reflection. Perhaps she did likewise now.
There was nothing to alarm me save my own eagerness.

The news of my father was perplexing, leading me to suppose him
re-established in London, awaiting the coming on of his Case. Whence the
money?

Money and my father, I knew, met as they divided, fortuitously; in
illustration of which, I well remembered, while passing in view of
the Key of the Adige along the Lombard plain, a circumstance during my
Alpine tour with Temple, of more importance to him than to me, when my
emulous friend, who would never be beaten, sprained his ankle severely
on the crags of a waterfall, not far from Innsbruck, and was invited
into a house by a young English lady, daughter of a retired Colonel of
Engineers of our army. The colonel was an exile from his country for no
grave crime: but, as he told us, as much an exile as if he had committed
a capital offence in being the father of nine healthy girls. He had
been, against his judgement, he averred, persuaded to fix on his
Tyrolese spot of ground by the two elder ones. Five were now married to
foreigners; thus they repaid him, by scattering good English blood on
the race of Counts and Freiherrs! ‘I could understand the decrees of
Providence before I was a parent,’ said this dear old Colonel Heddon.
‘I was looking up at the rainbow when I heard your steps, asking myself
whether it was seen in England at that instant, and why on earth I
should be out of England!’ He lived abroad to be able to dower his
girls. His sons-in-law were gentlemen; so far he was condemned to be
satisfied, but supposing all his girls married foreigners? His primitive
frankness charmed us, and it struck me that my susceptible Temple would
have liked to be in a position to reassure him with regard to the Lucy
of the four. We were obliged to confess that she was catching a foreign
accent. The old colonel groaned. He begged us to forgive him for
not treating us as strangers; his heart leapt out to young English
gentlemen.

My name, he said, reminded him of a great character at home, in the old
days: a certain Roy-Richmond, son of an actress and somebody, so the
story went: and there was an old Lord Edbury who knew more about it than
most. ‘Now Roy was an adventurer, but he had a soul of true chivalry,
by gad, he had! Plenty of foreign whiffmajigs are to be found, but you
won’t come upon a fellow like that. Where he got his money from none
knew: all I can say is, I don’t believe he ever did a dirty action for
it. And one matter I’ll tell you of: pardon me a moment, Mr. Richmond, I
haven’t talked English for half a century, or, at least, a quarter. Old
Lord Edbury put him down in his will for some thousands, and he risked
it to save a lady, who hated him for his pains. Lady Edbury was of the
Bolton blood, none of the tamest; they breed good cavalry men. She ran
away from her husband once. The old lord took her back. “It ‘s at your
peril, mind!” says she. Well, Roy hears by-and-by of afresh affair. He
mounted horse; he was in the saddle, I’ve been assured, a night and a
day, and posted himself between my lady’s park-gates, and the house,
at dusk. The rumour ran that he knew of the marquis playing spy on
his wife. However, such was the fact; she was going off again, and
the marquis did play the mean part. She walked down the parkroad, and,
seeing the cloaked figure of a man, she imagined him to be her Lothario,
and very naturally, you will own, fell into his arms. The gentleman
in question was an acquaintance of mine; and the less you follow our
example the better for you. It was a damnable period in morals! He
told me that he saw the scene from the gates, where he had his
carriage-and-four ready. The old lord burst out of an ambush on his
wife and her supposed paramour; the lady was imprisoned in her rescuer’s
arms, and my friend retired on tiptoe, which was, I incline to think,
the best thing he could do. Our morals were abominable. Lady Edbury
would never see Roy-Richmond after that, nor the old lord neither. He
doubled the sum he had intended to leave him, though. I heard that he
married a second young wife. Roy, I believe, ended by marrying a great
heiress, and reforming. He was an eloquent fellow, and stood like a
general in full uniform, cocked hat and feathers; most amusing fellow at
table; beat a Frenchman for anecdote.’

I spared Colonel Heddon the revelation of my relationship to his hero,
thanking his garrulity for interrupting me.

How I pitied him when I drove past the gates of the main route to
Innsbruck! For I was bound homeward: I should soon see England, green
cloudy England, the white cliffs, the meadows, the heaths! And I thanked
the colonel again in my heart for having done something to reconcile me
to the idea of that strange father of mine.

A banner-like stream of morning-coloured smoke rolled North-eastward
as I entered London, and I drove to Temple’s chambers. He was in Court,
engaged in a case as junior to his father. Temple had become that
radiant human creature, a working man, then? I walked slowly to the
Court, and saw him there, hardly recognising him in his wig. All that
he had to do was to prompt his father in a case of collision at sea; the
barque Priscilla had run foul of a merchant brig, near the mouth of the
Thames, and though I did not expect it on hearing the vessel’s name, it
proved to be no other than the barque Priscilla of Captain Jasper Welsh.
Soon after I had shaken Temple’s hand, I was going through the same
ceremony with the captain himself, not at all changed in appearance, who
blessed his heart for seeing me, cried out that a beard and mustachios
made a foreign face of a young Englishman, and was full of the
‘providential’ circumstance of his having confided his case to Temple
and his father.

‘Ay, ay, Captain Welsh,’ said Temple, ‘we have pulled you through, only
another time mind you keep an eye on that look-out man of yours. Some
of your men, I suspect, see double with an easy conscience. A close net
makes slippery eels.’

‘Have you anything to say against my men?’ the captain inquired.

Temple replied that he would talk to him about it presently, and laughed
as he drew me away.

‘His men will get him into a deuce of a scrape some day, Richie. I shall
put him on his guard. Have you had all my letters? You look made of
iron. I’m beginning capitally, not afraid of the Court a bit, and I hope
I’m not pert. I wish your father had taken it better!’

‘Taken what?’ said I.

‘Haven’t you heard from him?’

‘Two or three times: a mass of interjections.’

‘You know he brought his Case forward at last? Of course it went as we
all knew it would.’

‘Where is he? Have you seen Janet lately?’

‘He is at Miss Ilchester’s house in London.’

‘Write the address on a card.’

Temple wrote it rather hesitatingly, I thought.

We talked of seeing one another in the evening, and I sprang off to
Janet’s residence, forgetting to grasp my old friend’s hand at parting.
I was madly anxious to thank her for the unexpected tenderness to my
father. And now nothing stood between us!

My aunt Dorothy was the first to welcome me. ‘He must be prepared for
the sight of you, Harry. The doctors say that a shock may destroy him.
Janet treats him so wonderfully.’

I pressed her on my heart and cheered her, praising Janet. She wept.

‘Is there anything new the matter?’ I said.

‘It ‘s not new to us, Harry. I’m sure you’re brave?’

‘Brave! what am I asked to bear?’

‘Much, if you love her, Harry!’

‘Speak.’

‘It is better you should hear it from me, Harry. I wrote you word of it.
We all imagined it would not be disagreeable to you. Who could foresee
this change in you? She least of all!’

‘She’s in love with some one?’

‘I did not say in love.’

‘Tell me the worst.’

‘She is engaged to be married.’

Janet came into the room--another Janet for me. She had engaged herself
to marry the Marquis of Edbury. At the moment when she enslaved me with
gratitude and admiration she was lost to me. I knew her too well to see
a chance of her breaking her pledged word.

My old grandfather said of Janet, ‘She’s a compassionate thing.’ I felt
now the tears under his speech, and how late I was in getting wisdom.
Compassion for Edbury in Janet’s bosom was the matchmaker’s chief engine
of assault, my aunt Dorothy told me. Lady Ilchester had been for this
suitor, Sir Roderick for the other, up to the verge of a quarrel between
the most united of wedding couples. Janet was persecuted. She heard that
Edbury’s life was running to waste; she liked him for his cricketing and
hunting, his frankness, seeming manliness, and general native English
enthusiasm. I permitted myself to comprehend the case as far as I could
allow myself to excuse her.

Dorothy Beltham told me something of Janet that struck me to the dust.

‘It is this, dear Harry; bear to hear it! Janet and I and his good true
woman of a housekeeper, whose name is Waddy, we are, I believe, the only
persons that know it. He had a large company to dine at a City tavern,
she told us, on the night after the decision--when the verdict went
against him. The following morning I received a note from this good Mrs.
Waddy addressed to Sir Roderick’s London house, where I was staying with
Janet; it said that he was ill; and Janet put on her bonnet at once to
go to him.’

‘The lady didn’t fear contagion any longer?’

‘She went, walking fast. He was living in lodgings, and the people of
the house insisted on removing him, Mrs. Waddy told us. She was cowering
in the parlour. I had not the courage to go upstairs. Janet went by
herself.’

My heart rose on a huge swell.

‘She was alone with him, Harry. We could hear them.’

Dorothy Beltham looked imploringly on me to waken my whole
comprehension.

‘She subdued him. When I saw him he was white as death, but quiet, not
dangerous at all.’

‘Do you mean she found him raving?’ I cried out on our Maker’s name, in
grief and horror.

‘Yes, dear Harry, it was so.’

‘She stepped between him and an asylum?’

‘She quitted Sir Roderick’s house to lodge your father safe in one that
she hired, and have him under her own care. She watched him day and
night for three weeks, and governed him, assisted only at intervals by
the poor frightened woman, Mrs. Waddy, and just as frightened me. And
I am still subject to the poor woman’s way of pressing her hand to her
heart at a noise. It ‘s over now. Harry, Janet wished that you should
never hear of it. She dreads any excitement for him. I think she is
right in fancying her own influence the best: he is used to it. You know
how gentle she is though she is so firm.’

‘Oh! don’t torture me, ma’am, for God’s sake,’ I called aloud.



CHAPTER LV. I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT

There came to me a little note on foreign paper, unaddressed, an
enclosure forwarded by Janet, and containing merely one scrap from the
playful XENIEN of Ottilia’s favourite brotherly poets, of untranslatable
flavour:--

     Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete:
     Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels.

It filled me with a breath of old German peace.

From this I learnt that Ottilia and Janet corresponded. Upon what
topics? to what degree of intimacy?

Janet now confessed to me that their intimacy had never known reserve.
The princess had divined her attachment for Harry Richmond when their
acquaintance was commenced in the island, and knew at the present moment
that I had travelled round to the recognition of Janet’s worth.

Thus encouraged by the princess’s changeless friendship, I wrote to her,
leaving little to be guessed of my state of mind, withholding nothing of
the circumstances surrounding me. Imagination dealt me all my sharpest
misery, and now that Ottilia resumed her place there, I became
infinitely peacefuller, and stronger to subdue my hungry nature. It
caused me no pang, strangely though it read in my sight when written, to
send warm greetings and respects to the prince her husband.

Is it any waste of time to write of love? The trials of life are in
it, but in a narrow ring and a fierier. You may learn to know yourself
through love, as you do after years of life, whether you are fit to lift
them that are about you, or whether you are but a cheat, and a load
on the backs of your fellows. The impure perishes, the inefficient
languishes, the moderate comes to its autumn of decay--these are of the
kinds which aim at satisfaction to die of it soon or late. The love that
survives has strangled craving; it lives because it lives to nourish and
succour like the heavens.

But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death before you reach
your immortality.

But again, to write of a love perverted by all the elements contributing
to foolishness, and foredoomed to chastisement, would be a graceless
business. Janet and I went through our trial, she, you may believe, the
braver under the most to bear.

I was taken by Temple down to the ship--smelling East of London, for the
double purpose of trying to convince Captain Welsh of the extravagance
of a piece of chivalry he was about to commit, and of seeing a lady with
a history, who had recently come under his guardianship. Temple thought
I should know her, but he made a mystery of it until the moment of our
introduction arrived, not being certain of her identity, and not wishing
to have me disappointed. It appeared that Captain Welsh questioned his
men closely after he had won his case, and he arrived at the conclusion
that two or three of them had been guilty of false swearing in his
interests. He did not dismiss them, for, as he said, it was twice a bad
thing to turn sinners loose: it was to shove them out of the direct
road of amendment, and it was a wrong to the population. He insisted,
however, on paying the legal costs and an indemnity for the collision
at sea; and Temple was in great distress about it, he having originally
suggested the suspicion of his men to Captain Welsh. ‘I wanted to put
him on his guard against those rascals,’ Temple said, ‘and I suppose,’
he sighed, ‘I wanted the old captain to think me enormously clever all
round.’ He shook himself, and assumed a bearish aspect, significant of
disgust and recklessness. ‘The captain ‘ll be ruined, Richie; and he’s
not young, you know, to go on sailing his barque Priscilla for ever. If
he pays, why, I ought to pay, and then you ought to pay, for I shouldn’t
have shown off before him alone, and then the wind that fetched you
ought to pay. Toss common sense overboard, there’s no end to your
fine-drawings; that’s why it’s always safest to swear by the Judge.’

We rolled down to the masts among the chimneys on the top of an omnibus.
The driver was eloquent on cricket-matches. Now, cricket, he said, was
fine manly sport; it might kill a man, but it never meant mischief:
foreigners themselves had a bit of an idea that it was the best game in
the world, though it was a nice joke to see a foreigner playing at it!
None of them could stand to be bowled at. Hadn’t stomachs for it;
they’d have to train for soldiers first. On one occasion he had seen
a Frenchman looking on at a match. ‘Ball was hit a shooter twixt the
slips: off starts Frenchman, catches it, heaves it up, like his head,
half-way to wicket, and all the field set to bawling at him, and sending
him, we knew where. He tripped off: “You no comprong politeness in dis
country.” Ha! ha!’

To prove the aforesaid Frenchman wrong, we nodded to the driver’s
laughter at his exquisite imitation.

He informed us that he had backed the Surrey Eleven last year, owing
to the report of a gentleman-bowler, who had done things in the way of
tumbling wickets to tickle the ears of cricketers. Gentlemen-batters
were common: gentlemen-bowlers were quite another dish. Saddlebank was
the gentleman’s name.

‘Old Nandrew Saddle?’ Temple called to me, and we smiled at the
supposition of Saddlebank’s fame, neither of us, from what we had known
of his bowling, doubting that he deserved it.

‘Acquainted with him, gentlemen?’ the driver inquired, touching his hat.
‘Well, and I ask why don’t more gentlemen take to cricket? ‘stead of
horses all round the year! Now, there’s my notion of happiness,’
said the man condemned to inactivity, in the perpetual act of motion;
‘cricket in cricket season! It comprises--count: lots o’ running; and
that’s good: just enough o’ taking it easy; that’s good: a appetite for
your dinner, and your ale or your Port, as may be the case; good, number
three. Add on a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow, and
you say good morning to the doctor and the parson; for you’re in health
body and soul, and ne’er a parson ‘ll make a better Christian of ye,
that I’ll swear.’

As if anxious not to pervert us, he concluded: ‘That’s what I think,
gentlemen.’

Temple and I talked of the ancient raptures of a first of May
cricketing-day on a sunny green meadow, with an ocean of a day before
us, and well-braced spirits for the match. I had the vision of a
matronly, but not much altered Janet, mounted on horseback, to witness
the performance of some favourite Eleven of youngsters with her
connoisseur’s eye; and then the model of an English lady, wife, and
mother, waving adieu to the field and cantering home to entertain her
husband’s guests. Her husband!

Temple was aware of my grief, but saw no remedy. I knew that in his
heart he thought me justly punished, though he loved me.

We had a long sitting with Captain Welsh, whom I found immoveable, as I
expected I should. His men, he said, had confessed their sin similarly
to the crab in a hole, with one claw out, as the way of sinners was. He
blamed himself mainly. ‘Where you have accidents, Mr. Richmond, you have
faults; and where you have faults aboard a ship you may trace a line to
the captain. I should have treated my ship’s crew like my conscience,
and gone through them nightly. As it is, sir, here comes round one of
your accidents to tell me I have lived blinded by conceit. That is my
affliction, my young friend. The payment of the money is no more so than
to restore money held in trust.’

Temple and I argued the case with him, as of old on our voyage, on board
the barque Priscilla, quite unavailingly.

‘Is a verdict built on lies one that my Maker approves of?’ said he. ‘If
I keep possession of that money, my young friends, will it clothe me?
Ay, with stings! Will it feed me? Ay, with poison. And they that should
be having it shiver and want!’

He was emphatic, as he would not have been, save to read us an example,
owing to our contention with him. ‘The money is Satan in my very hands!’
When he had dismissed the subject he never returned to it.

His topic of extreme happiness, to which Temple led him, was the rescue
of a beautiful sinner from a life of shame. It appeared that Captain
Welsh had the habit between his voyages of making one holiday expedition
to the spot of all creation he thought the fairest, Richmond Hill,
overlooking the Thames; and there, one evening, he espied a lady in
grief, and spoke to her, and gave her consolation. More, he gave her a
blameless home. The lady’s name was Mabel Bolton. She was in distress of
spirit rather than of circumstances, for temptation was thick about one
so beautiful, to supply the vanities and luxuries of the father of sin.
He described her.

She was my first playfellow, the miller’s daughter of Dipwell, Mabel
Sweetwinter, taken from her home by Lord Edbury during my German
university career, and now put away by him upon command of his family on
the eve of his marriage.

She herself related her history to me, after telling me that she had
seen me once at the steps of Edbury’s Club. Our meeting was no great
surprise to either of us. She had heard my name as that of an expected
visitor; she had seen Temple, moreover, and he had prompted me with her
Christian name and the praise of her really glorious hair, to anticipate
the person who was ushered into the little cabin-like parlour by Captain
Welsh’s good old mother.

Of Edbury she could not speak for grief, believing that he loved her
still and was acting under compulsion. Her long and faithful attachment
to the scapegrace seemed to preserve her from the particular regrets
Captain Welsh supposed to occupy her sinner’s mind; so that, after
some minutes of the hesitation and strangeness due to our common
recollections, she talked of him simply and well--as befitted her
situation, a worldling might say. But she did not conceal her relief in
escaping to this quaint little refuge (she threw a kindly-comical
look, not overtoned, at the miniature ships on the mantelpiece, and
the picture of Joseph leading Mary with her babe on the ass) from the
temptations I could imagine a face like hers would expose her to. The
face was splendid, the figure already overblown. I breathed some thanks
to my father while she and I conversed apart. The miller was dead, her
brother in America. She had no other safe home than the one Captain
Welsh had opened to her. When I asked her (I had no excuse for it)
whether she would consent to go to Edbury again, she reddened and burst
into tears. I cursed my brutality. ‘Let her cry,’ said Captain Welsh
on parting with us at his street door. ‘Tears are the way of women and
their comfort.’

To our astonishment he told us he intended to take her for a voyage in
the Priscilla. ‘Why?’ we asked.

‘I take her,’ he said, ‘because not to do things wholly is worse than
not to do things at all, for it ‘s waste of time and cause for a
chorus below, down in hell, my young friends. The woman is beautiful
as Solomon’s bride. She is weak as water. And the man is wicked. He
has written to her a letter. He would have her reserved for himself, a
wedded man: such he is, or is soon to be. I am searching, and she is not
deceitful; and I am a poor man again and must go the voyage. I wrestled
with her, and by grace I conquered her to come with me of a free will,
and be out of his snares. Aboard I do not fear him, and she shall know
the mercy of the Lord on high seas.’

We grimaced a little on her behalf, but had nothing to reply.

Seeing Janet after Mabel was strange. In the latter one could perceive
the palpably suitable mate for Edbury.

I felt that my darling was insulted--no amends for it I had to keep
silent and mark the remorseless preparations going forward. Not so
Heriot. He had come over from the camp in Ireland on leave at this
juncture. His talk of women still suggested the hawk with the downy
feathers of the last little plucked bird sticking to his beak; but
his appreciation of Janet and some kindness for me made him a vehement
opponent of her resolve. He took licence of his friendship to lay every
incident before her, to complete his persuasions. She resisted his
attacks, as I knew she would, obstinately, and replied to his entreaties
with counter-supplications that he should urge me to accept old
Riversley. The conflicts went on between those two daily, and I heard
of them from Heriot at night. He refused to comprehend her determination
under the head of anything save madness. Varied by reproaches of me
for my former inveterate blindness, he raved upon Janet’s madness
incessantly, swearing that he would not be beaten. I told him his
efforts were useless, but thought them friendly, and so they were, only
Janet’s resistance had fired his vanity, and he stalked up and down my
room talking a mixture of egregious coxcombry and hearty good sense that
might have shown one the cause he meant to win had become personal to
him. Temple, who was sometimes in consultation with him, and was always
amused by his quasi-fanfaronade, assured me that Herriot was actually
scheming. The next we heard of him was, that he had been seen at a
whitebait hotel down the river drunk with Edbury. Janet also heard of
that, and declined to see Heriot again.

Our last days marched frightfully fast. Janet had learnt that any the
most distant allusion to her marriage day was an anguish to the man who
was not to marry her, so it was through my aunt Dorothy that I became
aware of Julia Bulsted’s kindness in offering to take charge of my
father for a term. Lady Sampleman undertook to be hostess to him for
one night, the eve of Janet’s nuptials. He was quiet, unlikely to give
annoyance to persons not strongly predisposed to hear sentences finished
and exclamations fall into their right places.

Adieu to my darling! There have been women well won; here was an
adorable woman well lost. After twenty years of slighting her, did I
fancy she would turn to me and throw a man over in reward of my ultimate
recovery of my senses?--or fancy that one so tenacious as she had proved
would snap a tie depending on her pledged word? She liked Edbury; she
saw the best of him, and liked him. The improved young lord was her
handiwork. After the years of humiliation from me, she had found
herself courted by a young nobleman who clung to her for help, showed
improvement, and brought her many compliments from a wondering world.
She really felt that she was strength and true life to him. She resisted
Heriot: she resisted a more powerful advocate, and this was the princess
Ottilia. My aunt Dorothy told me that the princess had written. Janet
either did or affected to weigh the princess’s reasonings; and she did
not evade the task of furnishing a full reply.

Her resolution was unchanged. Loss of colour, loss of light in her eyes,
were the sole signs of what it cost her to maintain it. Our task was
to transfer the idea of Janet to that of Julia in my father’s whirling
brain, which at first rebelled violently, and cast it out like a stick
thrust between rapidly revolving wheels.

The night before I was to take him away, she gave me her hand with a
‘good-bye, dear Harry.’ My words were much the same. She had a ghastly
face, but could not have known it, for she smiled, and tried to keep the
shallow smile in play, as friends do. There was the end.

It came abruptly, and was schoolingly cold and short.

It had the effect on me of freezing my blood and setting what seemed to
be the nerves of my brain at work in a fury of calculation to reckon the
minutes remaining of her maiden days. I had expected nothing, but now we
had parted I thought that one last scene to break my heart on should
not have been denied to me. My aunt Dorothy was a mute; she wept when I
spoke of Janet, whatever it was I said.

The minutes ran on from circumstance to circumstance of the destiny
Janet had marked for herself, each one rounded in my mind of a blood
colour like the edge about prismatic hues. I lived through them a
thousand times before they occurred, as the wretch who fears death dies
multitudinously.

Some womanly fib preserved my father from a shock on leaving Janet’s
house. She left it herself at the same time that she drove him to
Lady Sampleman’s, and I found him there soon after she had gone to her
bridesmaids. A letter was for me:--

   ‘DEAR HARRY,--I shall not live at Riversley, never go there again;
   do not let it be sold to a stranger; it will happen unless you go
   there. For the sake of the neighbourhood and poor people, I cannot
   allow it to be shut up. I was the cause of the chief misfortune.
   You never blamed me. Let me think that the old place is not dead.
   Adieu.

   ‘Your affectionate,
                  ‘JANET.’

I tore the letter to pieces, and kept them.

The aspect of the new intolerable world I was to live in after
to-morrow, paralyzed sensation. My father chattered, Lady Sampleman
hushed him; she said I might leave him to her, and I went down to
Captain Welsh to bid him good-bye and get such peace as contact with a
man clad in armour proof against earthly calamity could give.

I was startled to see little Kiomi in Mabel’s company.

They had met accidentally at the head of the street, and had been
friends in childhood, Captain Welsh said, adding: ‘She hates men.’

‘Good reason, when they’re beasts,’ said Kiomi.

Amid much weeping of Mabel and old Mrs. Welsh, Kiomi showed as little
trouble as the heath when the woods are swept.

Captain Welsh wanted Mabel to be on board early, owing, he told me, to
information. Kiomi had offered to remain on board with her until the
captain was able to come. He had business to do in the City.

We saw them off from the waterside.

‘Were I to leave that young woman behind me, on shore, I should be
giving the devil warrant to seize upon his prey,’ said Captain Welsh,
turning his gaze from the boat which conveyed Kiomi and Mabel to the
barque Priscilla. He had information that the misleader of her youth was
hunting her.

He and I parted, and for ever, at a corner of crossways in the central
city. There I saw the last of one who deemed it as simple a matter to
renounce his savings for old age, to rectify an error of justice, as to
plant his foot on the pavement; a man whose only burden was the folly of
men.

I thought to myself in despair, under what protest can I also escape
from England and my own intemperate mind? It seemed a miraculous
answer:--There lay at my chambers a note written by Count Kesensky; I
went to the embassy, and heard of an Austrian ship of war being at one
of our ports upon an expedition to the East, and was introduced to
the captain, a gentlemanly fellow, like most of the officers of his
Government. Finding in me a German scholar, and a joyful willingness, he
engaged me to take the post of secretary to the expedition in the
place of an invalided Freiherr von Redwitz. The bargain was struck
immediately: I was to be ready to report myself to the captain on
board not later than the following day. Count Kesensky led me aside:
he regretted that he could do nothing better for me: but I thought his
friendliness extreme and astonishing, and said so; whereupon the count
assured me that his intentions were good, though he had not been of
great use hitherto--an allusion to the borough of Chippenden he had only
heard of von Redwitz’s illness that afternoon. I thanked him cordially,
saying I was much in his debt, and he bowed me out, letting me fancy, as
my father had fancied before me, and as though I had never observed
and reflected in my life, that the opportuneness of this intervention
signified a special action of Providence.

The flattery of the thought served for an elixir. But with whom would my
father abide during my absence? Captain Bulsted and Julia saved me from
a fit of remorse; they had come up to town on purpose to carry him home
with them, and had left a message on my table, and an invitation to
dinner at their hotel, where the name of Janet was the Marino Faliero of
our review of Riversley people and old times. The captain and his wife
were indignant at her conduct. Since, however, I chose to excuse it,
they said they would say nothing more about her, and she was turned face
to the wall. I told them how Janet had taken him for months. ‘But I
‘ll take him for years,’ said Julia. ‘The truth is, Harry, my old dear!
William and I are never so united--for I’m ashamed to quarrel with
him--as when your father’s at Bulsted. He belongs to us, and other
people shall know you ‘re not obliged to depend on your family for help,
and your aunt Dorothy can come and see him whenever she likes.’

That was settled. Captain Bulsted went with me to Lady Sampleman’s
to prepare my father for the change of nurse and residence. We were
informed that he had gone down with Alderman Duke Saddlebank to dine at
one of the great City Companies’ halls. I could hardly believe it. ‘Ah!
my dear Mr. Harry,’ said Lady Sampleman, ‘old friends know one another
best, believe that, now. I treated him as if he was as well as ever he
was, gave him his turtle and madeira lunch; and Alderman Saddlebank, who
lunched here--your father used to say, he looks like a robin hopping out
of a larderquite jumped to dine him in the City like old times; and he
will see a great spread of plate!’

She thought my father only moderately unwell, wanting novelty. Captain
Bulsted agreed with me that it would be prudent to go and fetch him. At
the door of the City hall stood Andrew Saddlebank, grown to be simply
a larger edition of Rippenger’s head boy, and he imparted to us that
my father was ‘on his legs’ delivering a speech: It alarmed me. With
Saddlebank’s assistance I pushed in.

‘A prince! a treacherous lover! an unfatherly man!’

Those were the words I caught: a reproduction of many of my phrases
employed in our arguments on this very subject.

He bade his audience to beware of princes, beware of idle princes; and
letting his florid fancy loose on these eminent persons, they were at
one moment silver lamps, at another poising hawks, and again sprawling
pumpkins; anything except useful citizens. How could they be? They had
the attraction of the lamp, the appetite of the hawk, the occupation
of the pumpkin: nothing was given them to do but to shine, destroy,
and fatten. Their hands were kept empty: a trifle in their heads
would topple them over; they were monuments of the English system of
compromise. Happy for mankind if they were monuments only! Happy for
them! But they had the passions of men. The adulation of the multitude
was raised to inflate them, whose self-respect had not one prop to rest
on, unless it were contempt for the flatterers and prophetic foresight
of their perfidy. They were the monuments of a compromise between the
past and terror of the future; puppets as princes, mannikins as men, the
snares of frail women, stop-gaps of the State, feathered nonentities!

So far (but not in epigram) he marshalled the things he had heard to
his sound of drum and trumpet, like one repeating a lesson off-hand.
Steering on a sudden completely round, he gave his audience an outline
of the changes he would have effected had he but triumphed in his cause;
and now came the lashing of arms, a flood of eloquence. Princes with
brains, princes leaders, princes flowers of the land, he had offered
them! princes that should sway assemblies, and not stultify the precepts
of a decent people ‘by making you pay in the outrage of your morals
for what you seem to gain in policy.’ These or similar words. The whole
scene was too grotesque and afflicting. But his command of his hearers
was extraordinary, partly a consolation I thought, until, having touched
the arm of one of the gentlemen of the banquet and said, ‘I am his son;
I wish to remove him,’ the reply enlightened me: ‘I ‘m afraid there’s
danger in interrupting him; I really am.’

They were listening obediently to one whom they dared not interrupt for
fear of provoking an outburst of madness.

I had to risk it. His dilated eyes looked ready to seize on me for an
illustration. I spoke peremptorily, and he bowed his head low, saying,
‘My son, gentlemen,’ and submitted himself to my hands. The feasters
showed immediately that they felt released by rising and chatting in
groups. Alderman Saddlebank expressed much gratitude to me for the
service I had performed. ‘That first half of your father’s speech was
the most pathetic thing I ever heard!’ I had not shared his privilege,
and could not say. The remark was current that a great deal was true of
what had been said of the Fitzs. My father leaned heavily on my arm with
the step and bent head of an ancient pensioner of the Honourable City
Company. He was Julia Bulsted’s charge, and I was on board the foreign
vessel weighing anchor from England before dawn of Janet’s marriage-day.



CHAPTER LVI. CONCLUSION

The wind was high that morning. The rain came in gray rings, through
which we worked on the fretted surface of crumbling seas, heaving up and
plunging, without an outlook.

I remember having thought of the barque Priscilla as I watched our lithe
Dalmatians slide along the drenched decks of the Verona frigate.
At night it blew a gale. I could imagine it to have been sent
providentially to brush the torture of the land from my mind, and make
me feel that men are trifles.

What are their passions, then? The storm in the clouds--even more
short-lived than the clouds.

I philosophized, but my anguish was great.

Janet’s ‘Good-bye, Harry,’ ended everything I lived for, and seemed to
strike the day, and bring out of it the remorseless rain. A featureless
day, like those before the earth was built; like night under an angry
moon; and each day the same until we touched the edge of a southern
circle and saw light, and I could use my brain.

The matter most present to me was my injustice regarding my poor
father’s speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much
that I generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or
provoked some pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly
recollection divest the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart.
It was true that he had in his blind way struck the keynote of his
position, much as I myself had conceived it before. Harsh trials had
made me think of my own fortunes more than of his. This I felt, and I
thought there never had been so moving a speech. It seemed to make the
world in debt to us. What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?

In reality the busy little creature within me, whom we call self, was
digging pits for comfort to flow in, of any kind, in any form; and it
seized on every idea, every circumstance, to turn it to that purpose,
and with such success, that when by-and-by I learnt how entirely
inactive special Providence had been in my affairs, I had to collect
myself before I could muster the conception of gratitude toward the
noble woman who clothed me in the illusion. It was to the Princess
Ottilia, acting through Count Kesensky, that I owed both my wafting
away from England at a wretched season, and that chance of a career in
Parliament! The captain of the Verona hinted as much when, after a
year of voyaging, we touched at an East Indian seaport, and von Redwitz
joined the vessel to resume the post I was occupying. Von Redwitz (the
son of Prince Ernest’s Chancellor, I discovered) could have told me more
than he did, but he handed me a letter from the princess, calling
me home urgently, and even prescribing my route, and bidding me come
straight to Germany and to Sarkeld. The summons was distasteful, for I
had settled into harness under my scientific superiors, and had proved
to my messmates that I was neither morose nor over-conceited. Captain
Martinitz persuaded me to return, and besides, there lay between the
lines of Ottilia’s letter a signification of welcome things better
guessed at than known. Was I not bound to do her bidding? Others had
done it: young von Redwitz, for instance, in obeying the telegraph wires
and feigning sickness to surrender his place to me, when she wished to
save me from misery by hurrying me to new scenes with a task for my hand
and head;--no mean stretch of devotion on his part. Ottilia was still my
princess; she my providence. She wrote:

‘Come home, my friend Harry: you have been absent too long. He who
intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel,
and you nearer home. The home is always here where I am, but it may now
take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now
really loss of life. I tell you no more. You know me, that when I say
come, it is enough.’

A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter. Not a word
of Prince Hermann. What had happened? I guessed at it curiously and
incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope
as soon as I seemed to have divined it. I did not wrong my soul’s
high mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in
perplexity struck at impossibilities. Ottilia would never have summoned
me to herself. But was Janet free? The hope which refused to live in
that other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the bare
thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset it.
Had my girl’s courage failed, to spare her at the last moment? I fancied
it might be: I was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on me with
the force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the
little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me
back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well. It
cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.

I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to
pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that
two of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the
betrothal of one of them to an Englishman. The turn of the tide had come
to him. And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I have
to speak of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of the
autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be his
duty to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so many
of our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible offence
when the occasion for continuing it draws to a close. The pleasant
narrator in the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not the
philosopher who has come to know himself and his relations toward the
universe. The words of this last are one to twenty; his mind is bent
upon the causes of events rather than their progress. As you see me on
the page now, I stand somewhere between the two, approximating to
the former, but with sufficient of the latter within me to tame the
delightful expansiveness proper to that coming hour of marriage-bells
and bridal-wreaths. It is a sign that the end, and the delivery of
reader and writer alike, should not be dallied with.

The princess had invited Lucy Heddon to Sarkeld to meet Temple,
and Temple to meet me. Onward I flew. I saw the old woods of the
lake-palace, and, as it were, the light of my past passion waning
above them. I was greeted by the lady of all nobility with her gracious
warmth, and in his usual abrupt manful fashion by Prince Hermann. And
I had no time to reflect on the strangeness of my stepping freely under
the roof where a husband claimed Ottilia, before she led me into the
library, where sat my lost and recovered, my darling; and, unlike
herself, for a moment, she faltered in rising and breathing my name.

We were alone. I knew she was no bondwoman. The question how it had
come to pass lurked behind everything I said and did; speculation on
the visible features, and touching of the unfettered hand, restrained me
from uttering or caring to utter it. But it was wonderful. It thrust me
back on Providence again for the explanation--humbly this time. It was
wonderful and blessed, as to loving eyes the first-drawn breath of a
drowned creature restored to life. I kissed her hand. ‘Wait till you
have heard everything, Harry,’ she said, and her voice was deeper,
softer, exquisitely strange in its known tones, as her manner was, and
her eyes. She was not the blooming, straight-shouldered, high-breathing
girl of other days, but sister to the day of her ‘Good-bye, Harry,’ pale
and worn. The eyes had wept. This was Janet, haply widowed. She wore
no garb nor a shade of widowhood. Perhaps she had thrown it off, not to
offend an implacable temper in me. I said, ‘I shall hear nothing that
can make you other than my own Janet--if you will?’

She smiled a little. ‘We expected Temple’s arrival sooner than yours,
Harry!’

‘Do you take to his Lucy?’

‘Yes, thoroughly.’

The perfect ring of Janet was there.

Mention of Riversley made her conversation lively, and she gave me
moderately good news of my father, quaint, out of Julia Bulsted’s latest
letter to her.

‘Then how long,’ I asked astonished, ‘how long have you been staying
with the princess?’

She answered, colouring, ‘So long, that I can speak fairish German.’

‘And read it easily?’

‘I have actually taken to reading, Harry.’

Her courage must have quailed, and she must have been looking for me
on that morning of miserable aspect when I beheld the last of England
through wailful showers, like the scene of a burial. I did not speak of
it, fearing to hurt her pride, but said, ‘Have you been here--months?’

‘Yes, some months,’ she replied.

‘Many?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and dropped her eyelids, and then, with a quick look
at me, ‘Wait for Temple, Harry. He is a day behind his time. We can’t
account for it.’

I suggested, half in play, that perhaps he had decided, for the sake of
a sea voyage, to come by our old route to Germany on board the barque
Priscilla, with Captain Welsh.

A faint shudder passed over her. She shut her eyes and shook her head.

Our interview satisfied my heart’s hunger no further. The Verona’s
erratic voyage had cut me off from letters.

Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew. She was always Janet to
me; but why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the
princess? Was she neither maid nor widow--a wife flown from a brutal
husband? or separated, and forcibly free? Under such conditions Ottilia
would not have commanded my return but what was I to imagine? A boiling
couple of hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I
meditated, I could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned
to wait on me, and hear whether the English lady was a Fraulein. The
Margravine and Prince Ernest were absent. Hermann worked in his museum,
displaying his treasures to Colonel Heddon. I sat with the ladies in the
airy look-out tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense speculations,
which devoured themselves and changed from fire to smoke, while I
recounted the adventures of our ship’s voyage, and they behaved as if
there were nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the secret
I thirsted for. I should not certainly have thirsted much if Janet had
met me as far half-way as a delicate woman may advance. The mystery lay
in her evident affection, her apparent freedom and unfathomable reserve,
and her desire that I should see Temple before she threw off her
feminine armour, to which, judging by the indications, Ottilia seemed to
me to accede.

My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding dilatorily
over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages sent to meet
him. He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of minutes with his
trumpery ‘How d’ ye do’s,’ and his glances and excuses, and then I had
him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not Temple’s fault if
he did not begin straightforwardly.

I plucked him from his narrator’s vexatious and inevitable commencement:
‘Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?’

He answered ‘Yes!’

‘She did? Then she’s a widow?’

‘No, she isn’t,’ said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead I
distracted him by taking.

‘Then her husband’s alive?’

Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in
the dialogue.

‘Was she married?’

Temple said ‘No,’ with a lurking drollery about his lips. He added, ‘It
‘s nothing to laugh over, Richie.’

‘Am I laughing? Speak out. Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any
way?’

Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical: he
confessed it, and accused me of the provocation. He dashed some laughter
with gravity to prepare for my next assault.

‘Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage? Did he decline it?’

‘No,’ was the answer once more.

Temple stopped my wrath by catching at me and begging me to listen.

‘Edbury was drowned, Richie.’

‘Overnight?’

‘No, not overnight. I can tell it all in half-a-dozen words, if you’ll
be quiet; and I know you’re going to be as happy as I am, or I shouldn’t
trifle an instant. He went overnight on board the barque Priscilla to
see Mabel Sweetwinter, the only woman he ever could have cared for,
and he went the voyage, just as we did. He was trapped, caged, and
transported; it’s a repetition, except that the poor old Priscilla never
came to land. She foundered in a storm in the North Sea. That ‘s all we
know. Every soul perished, the captain and all. I knew how it would be
with that crew of his some day or other. Don’t you remember my saying
the Priscilla was the kind of name of a vessel that would go down with
all hands, and leave a bottle to float to shore? A gin-bottle was found
on our East coast-the old captain must have discovered in the last few
moments that such things were on board--and in it there was a paper, and
the passengers’ and crew’s names in his handwriting, written as if he
had been sitting in his parlour at home; over them a line--“The Lord’s
will is about to be done”; and underneath--“We go to His judgement
resigned and cheerful.” You know the old captain, Richie?

Temple had tears in his eyes. We both stood blinking for a second or
two.

I could not but be curious to hear the reason for Edbury’s having
determined to sail.

‘Don’t you understand how it was, Richie?’ said Temple. ‘Edbury went
to persuade her to stay, or just to see her for once, and he came to
persuasions. He seems to have been succeeding, but the captain stepped
on board and he treated Edbury as he did us two: he made him take the
voyage for discipline’s sake and “his soul’s health.”’

‘How do you know all this, Temple?’

‘You know your friend Kiomi was one of the party. The captain sent her
back on shore because he had no room for her. She told us Edbury offered
bribes of hundreds and thousands for the captain to let him and Mabel go
off in the boat with Kiomi, and then he took to begging to go alone.
He tried to rouse the crew. The poor fellow cringed, she says; he
threatened to swim off. The captain locked him up.’

My immediate reflections hit on the Bible lessons Edbury must have had
to swallow, and the gaping of the waters when its truths were suddenly
and tremendously brought home to him.

An odd series of accidents! I thought.

Temple continued: ‘Heriot held his tongue about it next morning. He was
one of the guests, though he had sworn he wouldn’t go. He said something
to Janet that betrayed him, for she had not seen him since.’

‘How betrayed him?’ said I.

‘Why,’ said Temple, ‘of course it was Heriot who put Edbury in Kiomi’s
hands. Edbury wouldn’t have known of Mabel’s sailing, or known the
vessel she was in, without her help. She led him down to the water and
posted him in sight before she went to Captain Welsh’s; and when you and
Captain Welsh walked away, Edbury rowed to the Priscilla. Old Heriot
is not responsible for the consequences. What he supposed was likely
enough. He thought that Edbury and Mabel were much of a pair, and
thought, I suppose, that if Edbury saw her he’d find he couldn’t leave
her, and old Lady Kane, who managed him, would stand nodding her plumes
for nothing at the altar. And so she did: and a pretty scene it was.
She snatched at the minutes as they slipped past twelve like fishes, and
snarled at the parson, and would have kept him standing till one P.M.,
if Janet had not turned on her heel. The old woman got in front of her
to block her way. “Ah, Temple,” she said to me, “it would be hard if I
could not think I had done all that was due to them.” I didn’t see her
again till she was starting for Germany. And, Richie, she thinks you
can never forgive her. She wrote me word that the princess is of another
mind, but her own opinion, she says, is based upon knowing you.’

‘Good heaven! how little!’ cried I.

Temple did me a further wrong by almost thanking me on Janet’s behalf
for my sustained love for her, while he praised the very qualities of
pride and a spirited sense of obligation which had reduced her to dread
my unforgivingness. Yet he and Janet had known me longest. Supposing
that my idea of myself differed from theirs for the simple reason that
I thought of what I had grown to be, and they of what I had been through
the previous years? Did I judge by the flower, and they by root and
stem? But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off: it
may be a different development next year. Did they not therefore judge
me soundly?

Ottilia was the keenest reader. Ottilia had divined what could be
wrought out of me. I was still subject to the relapses of a not
perfectly right nature, as I perceived when glancing back at my thought
of ‘An odd series of accidents!’ which was but a disguised fashion of
attributing to Providence the particular concern, in my fortunes: an
impiety and a folly! This is the temptation of those who are rescued and
made happy by circumstances. The wretched think themselves spited, and
are merely childish, not egregious in egoism. Thither on leads to a
chapter--already written by the wise, doubtless. It does not become an
atom of humanity to dwell on it beyond a point where students of the
human condition may see him passing through the experiences of the flesh
and the brain.

Meantime, Temple and I, at two hand-basins, soaped and towelled, and
I was more discreet toward him than I have been to you, for I reserved
from him altogether the pronunciation of the council of senators in the
secret chamber of my head. Whether, indeed, I have fairly painted the
outer part of myself waxes dubious when I think of his spluttering laugh
and shout; ‘Richie, you haven’t changed a bit--you’re just like a boy!’
Certain indications of external gravity, and a sinking of the natural
springs within characterized Temple’s approach to the responsible
position of a British husband and father. We talked much of Captain
Welsh, and the sedate practical irony of his imprisoning one like Edbury
to discipline him on high seas, as well as the singular situation of the
couple of culprits under his admonishing regimen, and the tragic end. My
next two minutes alone with Janet were tempered by it. Only my eagerness
for another term of privacy persuaded her that I was her lover instead
of judge, and then, having made the discovery that a single-minded
gladness animated me in the hope that she and I would travel together
one in body and soul, she surrendered, with her last bit of pride
broken; except, it may be, a fragment of reserve traceable in the
confession that came quaintly after supreme self-blame, when she said
she was bound to tell me that possibly--probably, were the trial to come
over again, she should again act as she had done.

Happily for us both, my wits had been sharpened enough to know that
there is more in men and women than the stuff they utter. And blessed
privilege now! if the lips were guilty of nonsense, I might stop them.
Besides, I was soon to be master upon such questions. She admitted it,
admitting with an unwonted emotional shiver, that absolute freedom could
be the worst of perils. ‘For women?’ said I. She preferred to say, ‘For
girls,’ and then ‘Yes, for women, as they are educated at present.’
Spice of the princess’s conversation flavoured her speech. The signs
unfamiliar about her for me were marks of the fire she had come out of;
the struggle, the torture, the determined sacrifice, through pride’s
conception of duty. She was iron once. She had come out of the fire
finest steel.

‘Riversley! Harry,’ she murmured, and my smile, and word, and squeeze in
reply, brought back a whole gleam of the fresh English morning she had
been in face, and voice, and person.

Was it conceivable that we could go back to Riversley single?

Before that was answered she had to make a statement; and in doing it
she blushed, because it involved Edbury’s name, and seemed to involve
her attachment to him; but she paid me the compliment of speaking
it frankly. It was that she had felt herself bound in honour to pay
Edbury’s debts. Even by such slight means as her saying, ‘Riversley,
Harry,’ and my kiss of her fingers when a question of money was in
debate, did we burst aside the vestiges of mutual strangeness, and
recognize one another, but with an added warmth of love. When I pleaded
for the marriage to be soon, she said, ‘I wish it, Harry.’

Sentiment you do not obtain from a Damascus blade. She most cordially
despised the ladies who parade and play on their sex, and are for ever
acting according to the feminine standard:--a dangerous stretch of
contempt for one less strong than she.

Riding behind her and Temple one day with the princess, I said, ‘What
takes you most in Janet?’

She replied, ‘Her courage. And it is of a kind that may knot up
every other virtue worth having. I have impulses, and am capable of
desperation, but I have no true courage: so I envy and admire, even if
I have to blame her; for I know that this possession of hers, which
identifies her and marks her from the rest of us, would bear the ordeal
of fire. I can imagine the qualities I have most pride in withering and
decaying under a prolonged trial. I cannot conceive her courage failing.
Perhaps because I have it not myself I think it the rarest of precious
gifts. It seems to me to imply one half, and to dispense with the
other.’

I have lived to think that Ottilia was right. As nearly right, too,
in the wording of her opinion as one may be in three or four sentences
designed to be comprehensive.

My Janet’s readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home upon
an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the very
saddest that could have been devised to test her spirit of endurance,
when, driving up the higher heath-land, we saw the dark sky ominously
reddened over Riversley, and, mounting the ridge, had the funeral
flames of the old Grange dashed in our faces. The blow was evil,
sudden, unaccountable. Villagers, tenants, farm-labourers, groups of a
deputation that had gone to the railway station to give us welcome;
and returned, owing to a delay in our arrival, stood gazing from all
quarters. The Grange was burning in two great wings, that soared in
flame-tips and columns of crimson smoke, leaving the central hall and
chambers untouched as yet, but alive inside with mysterious ranges of
lights, now curtained, now made bare--a feeble contrast to the
savage blaze to right and left, save for the wonder aroused as to its
significance. These were soon cloaked. Dead sable reigned in them, and
at once a jet of flame gave the whole vast building to destruction. My
wife thrust her hand in mine. Fire at the heart, fire at the wings--our
old home stood in that majesty of horror which freezes the limbs of men,
bidding them look and no more.

‘What has Riversley done to deserve this?’ I heard Janet murmur to
herself. ‘His room!’ she said, when at the South-east wing, where my old
grandfather had slept, there burst a glut of flame. We dove down to the
park and along the carriage-road to the first red line of gazers. They
told us that no living creatures were in the house. My aunt Dorothy was
at Bulsted. I perceived my father’s man Tollingby among the servants,
and called him to me; others came, and out of a clatter of tongues, and
all eyes fearfully askant at the wall of fire, we gathered that a great
reception had been prepared for us by my father: lamps, lights in all
the rooms, torches in the hall, illuminations along the windows, stores
of fireworks, such a display as only he could have dreamed of. The fire
had broken out at dusk, from an explosion of fireworks at one wing and
some inexplicable mismanagement at the other. But the house must have
been like a mine, what with the powder, the torches, the devices
in paper and muslin, and the extraordinary decorations fitted up to
celebrate our return in harmony with my father’s fancy.

Gentlemen on horseback dashed up to us. Captain Bulsted seized my hand.
He was hot from a ride to fetch engines, and sang sharp in my ear, ‘Have
you got him?’ It was my father he meant. The cry rose for my father,
and the groups were agitated and split, and the name of the missing man,
without an answer to it, shouted. Captain Bulsted had left him bravely
attempting to quench the flames after the explosion of fireworks. He
rode about, interrogating the frightened servants and grooms holding
horses and dogs. They could tell us that the cattle were safe, not a
word of my father; and amid shrieks of women at fresh falls of timber
and ceiling into the pit of fire, and warnings from the men, we ran
the heated circle of the building to find a loophole and offer aid if
a living soul should be left; the night around us bright as day, busier
than day, and a human now added to elemental horror. Janet would not
quit her place. She sent her carriage-horses to Bulsted, and sat in the
carriage to see the last of burning Riversley. Each time that I came to
her she folded her arms on my neck and kissed me silently.

We gathered from the subsequent testimony of men and women of the
household who had collected their wits, that my father must have
remained in the doomed old house to look to the safety of my aunt
Dorothy. He was never seen again.

     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS

     A stew’s a stew, and not a boiling to shreds
     Absolute freedom could be the worst of perils
     Add on a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow
     All passed too swift for happiness
     Allowed silly sensitiveness to prevent the repair
     As little trouble as the heath when the woods are swept
     Ask pardon of you, without excusing myself
     Attacked my conscience on the cowardly side
     Bade his audience to beware of princes
     Bandied the weariful shuttlecock of gallantry
     But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off
     But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death
     Days when you lay on your back and the sky rained apples
     Decent insincerity
     Determine that the future is in our debt, and draw on it
     Discreet play with her eyelids in our encounters
     Dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man
     Excellent is pride; but oh! be sure of its foundations
     Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them
     Habit of antedating his sagacity
     He clearly could not learn from misfortune
     He thinks or he chews
     He would neither retort nor defend himself
     He whipped himself up to one of his oratorical frenzies
     He put no question to anybody
     I can’t think brisk out of my breeches
     I can pay clever gentlemen for doing Greek for me
     I do not defend myself ever
     I was discontented, and could not speak my discontent
     I laughed louder than was necessary
     If you kneel down, who will decline to put a foot on you?
     Intimations of cowardice menacing a paralysis of the will
     Irony instead of eloquence
     Is it any waste of time to write of love?
     It goes at the lifting of the bridegroom’s little finger
     Kindness is kindness, all over the world
     Learn all about them afterwards, ay, and make the best of them
     Like a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master
     Look within, and avoid lying
     Mindless, he says, and arrogant
     Nations at war are wild beasts
     No Act to compel a man to deny what appears in the papers
     Not to do things wholly is worse than not to do things at all
     One in a temper at a time I’m sure ‘s enough
     One who studies is not being a fool
     Only true race, properly so called, out of India--German
     Payment is no more so than to restore money held in trust
     Puns are the smallpox of the language
     Self, was digging pits for comfort to flow in
     Simple affection must bear the strain of friendship if it can
     Simplicity is the keenest weapon
     Some so-called laws of honour
     Stand not in my way, nor follow me too far
     Stultification of one’s feelings and ideas
     Tears are the way of women and their comfort
     Tension of the old links keeping us together
     The most dangerous word of all--ja
     The love that survives has strangled craving
     The thought stood in her eyes
     The proper defence for a nation is its history
     The wretch who fears death dies multitudinously
     The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing
     Then for us the struggle, for him the grief
     There is more in men and women than the stuff they utter
     There’s ne’er a worse off but there’s a better off
     They seem to me to be educated to conceal their education
     They have not to speak to exhibit their minds
     They dare not. The more I dare, the less dare they
     They are little ironical laughter--Accidents
     Those who are rescued and made happy by circumstances
     Tight grasps of the hand, in which there was warmth and shyness
     ‘Tis the fashion to have our tattle done by machinery
     To hope, and not be impatient, is really to believe
     To the rest of the world he was a progressive comedy
     To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common
     Too prompt, too full of personal relish of his point
     Twice a bad thing to turn sinners loose
     Unseemly hour--unbetimes
     Vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect
     War is only an exaggerated form of duelling
     Was I true? Not so very false, yet how far from truth!
     We has long overshadowed “I”
      What a man hates in adversity is to see ‘faces’
     What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?
     Who beguiles so much as Self?
     Who so intoxicated as the convalescent catching at health?
     Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete
     Winter mornings are divine. They move on noiselessly
     Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels
     You may learn to know yourself through love
     You may learn to know yourself through love





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