The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8
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George Meredith >> The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8
The truth of my words could not be controverted. Unhappily I confounded
right speaking with right acting, and conceived, because I spoke so
justly, that I was specially approved in pressing her to yield.
She broke the first pause to say, 'It's useless, Harry. I do what I
think I am bound to do.'
'Then I have spoken to no purpose!'
'If you will only be kind, and wait two or three days?'
'Be sensible!'
'I am, as much as I can be.'
'Hard as a flint--you always were! The most grateful woman alive, I
admit. I know not another, I assure you, Janet, who, in return for
millions of money, would do such a piece of wanton cruelty. What! You
think he was not punished enough when he was berated and torn to shreds
in your presence? They would be cruel, perhaps--we will suppose it of
your sex--but not so fond of their consciences as to stamp a life out to
keep an oath. I forget the terms of the Will. Were you enjoined in it
to force him away?'
My father had stationed himself in the background. Mention of the Will
caught his ears, and he commenced shaking my aunt Dorothy's note,
blinking and muttering at a great rate, and pressing his temples.
'I do not read a word of this,' he said,--'upon my honour, not a word;
and I know it is her handwriting. That Will!--only, for the love of
heaven, madam,'--he bowed vaguely to Janet 'not a syllable of this to the
princess, or we are destroyed. I have a great bell in my head, or I
would say more. Hearing is out of the question.'
Janet gazed piteously from him to me.
To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common.
I begged my father to walk along the carriage-drive. He required that
the direction should be pointed out accurately, and promptly obeyed me,
saying: 'I back you, remember. I should certainly be asleep now but for
this extraordinary bell.' After going some steps, he turned to shout
'Gong,' and touched his ear. He walked loosely, utterly unlike the walk
habitual to him even recently in Paris.
'Has he been ill?' Janet asked.
'He won't see the doctor; the symptoms threaten apoplexy or paralysis,
I 'm told. Let us finish. You were aware that you were to inherit
Riversley?'
'Yes, Riversley, Harry; I knew that; I knew nothing else.'
'The old place was left to you that you might bar my father out?'
'I gave my word.'
'You pledged it--swore?'
'No.'
'Well, you've done your worst, my dear. If the axe were to fall on your
neck for it, you would still refuse, would you not?'
Janet answered softly: 'I believe so.'
'Then, good-bye,' said I.
That feminine softness and its burden of unalterable firmness pulled me
two ways, angering me all the more that I should feel myself susceptible
to a charm which came of spiritual rawness rather than sweetness; for she
needed not to have made the answer in such a manner; there was pride in
it; she liked the soft sound of her voice while declaring herself
invincible: I could see her picturing herself meek but fixed.
'Will you go, Harry? Will you not take Riversley?' she said.
I laughed.
'To spare you the repetition of the dilemma?'
'No, Harry; but this might be done.'
'But--my fullest thanks to you for your generosity: really! I speak in
earnest: it would be decidedly against your grandada's wishes, seeing
that he left the Grange to you, and not to me.'
'Grandada's wishes! I cannot carry out all his wishes,' she sighed.
'Are you anxious to?'
We were on the delicate ground, as her crimson face revealed to me that
she knew as well as I.
I, however, had little delicacy in leading her on it. She might well
feel that she deserved some wooing.
I fancied she was going to be overcome, going to tremble and show herself
ready to fall on my bosom, and I was uncertain of the amount of
magnanimity in store there.
She replied calmly, 'Not immediately.'
'You are not immediately anxious to fulfil his wishes?'
'Harry, I find it hard to do those that are thrust on me.'
'But, as a matter of serious obligation, you would hold yourself bound by
and by to perform them all?'
'I cannot speak any further of my willingness, Harry.'
'The sense of duty is evidently always sufficient to make you act upon
the negative--to deny, at least?'
'Yes, I daresay,' said Janet.
We shook hands like a pair of commercial men.
I led my father to Bulsted. He was too feverish to remain there. In the
evening, after having had a fruitless conversation with my aunt Dorothy
upon the event of the day, I took him to London that he might visit his
lawyers, who kindly consented to treat him like doctors, when I had
arranged to make over to them three parts of my annuity, and talked of
his Case encouragingly; the effect of which should not have astonished
me. He closed a fit of reverie resembling his drowsiness, by exclaiming:
'Richie will be indebted to his dad for his place in the world after
all!' Temporarily, he admitted, we must be fugitives from creditors, and
as to that eccentric tribe, at once so human and so inhuman, he imparted
many curious characteristics gained of his experience. Jorian DeWitt had
indeed compared them to the female ivy that would ultimately kill its
tree, but inasmuch as they were parasites, they loved their debtor; he
was life and support to them, and there was this remarkable fact about
them: by slipping out of their clutches at critical moments when they
would infallibly be pulling you down, you were enabled to return to them
fresh, and they became inspired with another lease of lively faith in
your future: et caetera. I knew the language. It was a flash of
himself, and a bad one, but I was not the person whom he meant to deceive
with it. He was soon giving me other than verbal proof out of England
that he was not thoroughly beaten. We had no home in England. At an
hotel in Vienna, upon the close of the aristocratic season there, he
renewed an acquaintance with a Russian lady, Countess Kornikoff, and he
and I parted. She disliked the Margravine of Rippau, who was in Vienna,
and did not recognize us. I heard that it was the Margravine who had
despatched Prince Hermann to England as soon as she discovered Ottilia's
flight thither. She commissioned him to go straightway to Roy in London,
and my father's having infatuatedly left his own address for Prince
Ernest's in the island, brought Hermann down: he only met Eckart in the
morning train. I mention it to show the strange working of events.
Janet sent me a letter by the hands of Temple in August. It was
moderately well written for so blunt a writer, and might have touched me
but for other news coming simultaneously that shook the earth under my
feet.
She begged my forgiveness for her hardness, adding characteristically
that she could never have acted in any other manner. The delusion, that
what she was she must always be, because it was her nature, had mastered
her understanding, or rather it was one of the doors of her understanding
not yet opened: she had to respect her grandada's wishes. She made it
likewise appear that she was ready for further sacrifices to carry out
the same.
'At least you will accept a division of the property, Harry. It should
be yours. It is an excess, and I feel it a snare to me. I was a selfish
child: I may not become an estimable woman. You have not pardoned my
behaviour at the island last year, and I cannot think I was wrong:
perhaps I might learn: I want your friendship and counsel. Aunty will
live with me: she says that you would complete us. At any rate I
transfer Riversley to you. Send me your consent. Papa will have it
before the transfer is signed.'
The letter ended with an adieu, a petition for an answer, and ' yours
affectionately.'
On the day of its date, a Viennese newspaper lying on the Salzburg Hotel
table chronicled Ottilia's marriage with Prince Hermann.
I turned on Temple to walk him off his legs if I could.
Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased not to sit down in
sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul
and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and
infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks;
taste danger, sweat, earn rest: learn to discover ungrudgingly that
haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest
is your uttermost reward. Would you know what it is to hope again, and
have all your hopes at hand?--hang upon the crags at a gradient: that
makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you
may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like
flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient: if
just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. How the old lax life
closes in about you there! You are the man of your faculties, nothing
more. Why should a man pretend to more? We ask it wonderingly when we
are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the
joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical
herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall
to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed
crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to
the mountain kine.
CHAPTER LIV
MY RETURN TO ENGLAND
I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in love with the East,
until it began to consume me. History, like the air we breathe, must be
in motion to keep us uncorrupt: otherwise its ancient homes are
infectious. My passion for the sun and his baked people lasted awhile,
the drudgery of the habit of voluntary exile some time longer, and then,
quite unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so violent that I
abandoned a correspondence of several months, lying for me both at
Damascus and Cairo, to catch the boat for Europe. A dream of a rainy
morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have been the origin of
the wild craving I had for my native land and Janet. The moist air of
flying showers and drenched spring buds surrounded her; I saw her plainly
lifting a rose's head; was it possible I had ever refused to be her
yokefellow? Could so noble a figure of a fair young woman have been
offered and repudiated again and again by a man in his senses? I spurned
the intolerable idiot, to stop reflection. Perhaps she did likewise now.
There was nothing to alarm me save my own eagerness.
The news of my father was perplexing, leading me to suppose him
re-established in London, awaiting the coming on of his Case. Whence the
money?
Money and my father, I knew, met as they divided, fortuitously; in
illustration of which, I well remembered, while passing in view of the
Key of the Adige along the Lombard plain, a circumstance during my Alpine
tour with Temple, of more importance to him than to me, when my emulous
friend, who would never be beaten, sprained his ankle severely on the
crags of a waterfall, not far from Innsbruck, and was invited into a
house by a young English lady, daughter of a retired Colonel of Engineers
of our army. The colonel was an exile from his country for no grave
crime: but, as he told us, as much an exile as if he had committed a
capital offence in being the father of nine healthy girls. He had been,
against his judgement, he averred, persuaded to fix on his Tyrolese spot
of ground by the two elder ones. Five were now married to foreigners;
thus they repaid him, by scattering good English blood on the race of
Counts and Freiherrs! 'I could understand the decrees of Providence
before I was a parent,' said this dear old Colonel Heddon. 'I was
looking up at the rainbow when I heard your steps, asking myself whether
it was seen in England at that instant, and why on earth I should be out
of England!' He lived abroad to be able to dower his girls. His sons-
in-law were gentlemen; so far he was condemned to be satisfied, but
supposing all his girls married foreigners? His primitive frankness
charmed us, and it struck me that my susceptible Temple would have liked
to be in a position to reassure him with regard to the Lucy of the four.
We were obliged to confess that she was catching a foreign accent. The
old colonel groaned. He begged us to forgive him for not treating us as
strangers; his heart leapt out to young English gentlemen.
My name, he said, reminded him of a great character at home, in the old
days: a certain Roy-Richmond, son of an actress and somebody, so the
story went: and there was an old Lord Edbury who knew more about it than
most. 'Now Roy was an adventurer, but he had a soul of true chivalry, by
gad, he had! Plenty of foreign whiffmajigs are to be found, but you
won't come upon a fellow like that. Where he got his money from none
knew: all I can say is, I don't believe he ever did a dirty action for
it. And one matter I'll tell you of: pardon me a moment, Mr. Richmond,
I haven't talked English for half a century, or, at least, a quarter.
Old Lord Edbury put him down in his will for some thousands, and he
risked it to save a lady, who hated him for his pains. Lady Edbury was
of the Bolton blood, none of the tamest; they breed good cavalry men.
She ran away from her husband once. The old lord took her back. "It 's
at your peril, mind!" says she. Well, Roy hears by-and-by of afresh
affair. He mounted horse; he was in the saddle, I've been assured, a
night and a day, and posted himself between my lady's park-gates, and the
house, at dusk. The rumour ran that he knew of the marquis playing spy
on his wife. However, such was the fact; she was going off again, and
the marquis did play the mean part. She walked down the parkroad, and,
seeing the cloaked figure of a man, she imagined him to be her Lothario,
and very naturally, you will own, fell into his arms. The gentleman in
question was an acquaintance of mine; and the less you follow our example
the better for you. It was a damnable period in morals! He told me that
he saw the scene from the gates, where he had his carriage-and-four
ready. The old lord burst out of an ambush on his wife and her supposed
paramour; the lady was imprisoned in her rescuer's arms, and my friend
retired on tiptoe, which was, I incline to think, the best thing he could
do. Our morals were abominable. Lady Edbury would never see Roy-
Richmond after that, nor the old lord neither. He doubled the sum he had
intended to leave him, though. I heard that he married a second young
wife. Roy, I believe, ended by marrying a great heiress, and reforming.
He was an eloquent fellow, and stood like a general in full uniform,
cocked hat and feathers; most amusing fellow at table; beat a Frenchman
for anecdote.'
I spared Colonel Heddon the revelation of my relationship to his hero,
thanking his garrulity for interrupting me.
How I pitied him when I drove past the gates of the main route to
Innsbruck! For I was bound homeward: I should soon see England, green
cloudy England, the white cliffs, the meadows, the heaths! And I thanked
the colonel again in my heart for having done something to reconcile me
to the idea of that strange father of mine.
A banner-like stream of morning-coloured smoke rolled North-eastward as I
entered London, and I drove to Temple's chambers. He was in Court,
engaged in a case as junior to his father. Temple had become that
radiant human creature, a working man, then? I walked slowly to the
Court, and saw him there, hardly recognising him in his wig. All that he
had to do was to prompt his father in a case of collision at sea; the
barque Priscilla had run foul of a merchant brig, near the mouth of the
Thames, and though I did not expect it on hearing the vessel's name, it
proved to be no other than the barque Priscilla of Captain Jasper Welsh.
Soon after I had shaken Temple's hand, I was going through the same
ceremony with the captain himself, not at all changed in appearance, who
blessed his heart for seeing me, cried out that a beard and mustachios
made a foreign face of a young Englishman, and was full of the
'providential' circumstance of his having confided his case to Temple and
his father.
'Ay, ay, Captain Welsh,' said Temple, 'we have pulled you through, only
another time mind you keep an eye on that look-out man of yours. Some of
your men, I suspect, see double with an easy conscience. A close net
makes slippery eels.'
'Have you anything to say against my men?' the captain inquired.
Temple replied that he would talk to him about it presently, and laughed
as he drew me away.
'His men will get him into a deuce of a scrape some day, Richie. I shall
put him on his guard. Have you had all my letters? You look made of
iron. I'm beginning capitally, not afraid of the Court a bit, and I hope
I'm not pert. I wish your father had taken it better!'
'Taken what?' said I.
'Haven't you heard from him?'
'Two or three times: a mass of interjections.'
'You know he brought his Case forward at last? Of course it went as we
all knew it would.'
'Where is he? Have you seen Janet lately?'
'He is at Miss Ilchester's house in London.'
'Write the address on a card.'
Temple wrote it rather hesitatingly, I thought.
We talked of seeing one another in the evening, and I sprang off to
Janet's residence, forgetting to grasp my old friend's hand at parting.
I was madly anxious to thank her for the unexpected tenderness to my
father. And now nothing stood between us!
My aunt Dorothy was the first to welcome me. 'He must be prepared for
the sight of you, Harry. The doctors say that a shock may destroy him.
Janet treats him so wonderfully.'
I pressed her on my heart and cheered her, praising Janet. She wept.
'Is there anything new the matter?' I said.
'It 's not new to us, Harry. I'm sure you're brave?'
'Brave! what am I asked to bear?'
'Much, if you love her, Harry!'
'Speak.'
'It is better you should hear it from me, Harry. I wrote you word of it.
We all imagined it would not be disagreeable to you. Who could foresee
this change in you? She least of all!'
'She's in love with some one?'
'I did not say in love.'
'Tell me the worst.'
'She is engaged to be married.'
Janet came into the room--another Janet for me. She had engaged herself
to marry the Marquis of Edbury. At the moment when she enslaved me with
gratitude and admiration she was lost to me. I knew her too well to see
a chance of her breaking her pledged word.
My old grandfather said of Janet, 'She's a compassionate thing.' I felt
now the tears under his speech, and how late I was in getting wisdom.
Compassion for Edbury in Janet's bosom was the matchmaker's chief engine
of assault, my aunt Dorothy told me. Lady Ilchester had been for this
suitor, Sir Roderick for the other, up to the verge of a quarrel between
the most united of wedding couples. Janet was persecuted. She heard
that Edbury's life was running to waste; she liked him for his cricketing
and hunting, his frankness, seeming manliness, and general native English
enthusiasm. I permitted myself to comprehend the case as far as I could
allow myself to excuse her.
Dorothy Beltham told me something of Janet that struck me to the dust.
'It is this, dear Harry; bear to hear it! Janet and I and his good true
woman of a housekeeper, whose name is Waddy, we are, I believe, the only
persons that know it. He had a large company to dine at a City tavern,
she told us, on the night after the decision--when the verdict went
against him. The following morning I received a note from this good Mrs.
Waddy addressed to Sir Roderick's London house, where I was staying with
Janet; it said that he was ill; and Janet put on her bonnet at once to go
to him.'
'The lady didn't fear contagion any longer?'
'She went, walking fast. He was living in lodgings, and the people of
the house insisted on removing him, Mrs. Waddy told us. She was cowering
in the parlour. I had not the courage to go upstairs. Janet went by
herself.'
My heart rose on a huge swell.
'She was alone with him, Harry. We could hear them.'
Dorothy Beltham looked imploringly on me to waken my whole comprehension.
'She subdued him. When I saw him he was white as death, but quiet, not
dangerous at all.'
'Do you mean she found him raving?' I cried out on our Maker's name, in
grief and horror.
'Yes, dear Harry, it was so.'
'She stepped between him and an asylum?'
'She quitted Sir Roderick's house to lodge your father safe in one that
she hired, and have him under her own care. She watched him day and
night for three weeks, and governed him, assisted only at intervals by
the poor frightened woman, Mrs. Waddy, and just as frightened me. And I
am still subject to the poor woman's way of pressing her hand to her
heart at a noise. It 's over now. Harry, Janet wished that you should
never hear of it. She dreads any excitement for him. I think she is
right in fancying her own influence the best: he is used to it. You know
how gentle she is though she is so firm.'
'Oh! don't torture me, ma'am, for God's sake,' I called aloud.
CHAPTER LV
I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT
There came to me a little note on foreign paper, unaddressed, an
enclosure forwarded by Janet, and containing merely one scrap from the
playful XENIEN of Ottilia's favourite brotherly poets, of untranslatable
flavour:--
Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete:
Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels.
It filled me with a breath of old German peace.
From this I learnt that Ottilia and Janet corresponded. Upon what
topics? to what degree of intimacy?
Janet now confessed to me that their intimacy had never known reserve.
The princess had divined her attachment for Harry Richmond when their
acquaintance was commenced in the island, and knew at the present moment
that I had travelled round to the recognition of Janet's worth.
Thus encouraged by the princess's changeless friendship, I wrote to her,
leaving little to be guessed of my state of mind, withholding nothing of
the circumstances surrounding me. Imagination dealt me all my sharpest
misery, and now that Ottilia resumed her place there, I became infinitely
peacefuller, and stronger to subdue my hungry nature. It caused me no
pang, strangely though it read in my sight when written, to send warm
greetings and respects to the prince her husband.
Is it any waste of time to write of love? The trials of life are in it,
but in a narrow ring and a fierier. You may learn to know yourself
through love, as you do after years of life, whether you are fit to lift
them that are about you, or whether you are but a cheat, and a load on
the backs of your fellows. The impure perishes, the inefficient
languishes, the moderate comes to its autumn of decay--these are of the
kinds which aim at satisfaction to die of it soon or late. The love that
survives has strangled craving; it lives because it lives to nourish and
succour like the heavens.
But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death before you reach
your immortality.
But again, to write of a love perverted by all the elements contributing
to foolishness, and foredoomed to chastisement, would be a graceless
business. Janet and I went through our trial, she, you may believe, the
braver under the most to bear.
I was taken by Temple down to the ship--smelling East of London, for the
double purpose of trying to convince Captain Welsh of the extravagance of
a piece of chivalry he was about to commit, and of seeing a lady with a
history, who had recently come under his guardianship. Temple thought I
should know her, but he made a mystery of it until the moment of our
introduction arrived, not being certain of her identity, and not wishing
to have me disappointed. It appeared that Captain Welsh questioned his
men closely after he had won his case, and he arrived at the conclusion
that two or three of them had been guilty of false swearing in his
interests. He did not dismiss them, for, as he said, it was twice a bad
thing to turn sinners loose: it was to shove them out of the direct road
of amendment, and it was a wrong to the population. He insisted,
however, on paying the legal costs and an indemnity for the collision at
sea; and Temple was in great distress about it, he having originally
suggested the suspicion of his men to Captain Welsh. 'I wanted to put
him on his guard against those rascals,' Temple said, 'and I suppose,'
he sighed, 'I wanted the old captain to think me enormously clever all
round.' He shook himself, and assumed a bearish aspect, significant of
disgust and recklessness. 'The captain 'll be ruined, Richie; and he's
not young, you know, to go on sailing his barque Priscilla for ever. If
he pays, why, I ought to pay, and then you ought to pay, for I shouldn't
have shown off before him alone, and then the wind that fetched you ought
to pay. Toss common sense overboard, there's no end to your fine-
drawings; that's why it's always safest to swear by the Judge.'