The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8

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THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND

By George Meredith

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 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.'

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