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The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Complete

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




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