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The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Complete




'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.'