The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8
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George Meredith >> The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8
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.