The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8
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George Meredith >> The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v8
We rolled down to the masts among the chimneys on the top of an omnibus.
The driver was eloquent on cricket-matches. Now, cricket, he said, was
fine manly sport; it might kill a man, but it never meant mischief:
foreigners themselves had a bit of an idea that it was the best game in
the world, though it was a nice joke to see a foreigner playing at it!
None of them could stand to be bowled at. Hadn't stomachs for it; they'd
have to train for soldiers first. On one occasion he had seen a
Frenchman looking on at a match. 'Ball was hit a shooter twixt the
slips: off starts Frenchman, catches it, heaves it up, like his head,
half-way to wicket, and all the field set to bawling at him, and sending
him, we knew where. He tripped off: "You no comprong politeness in dis
country." Ha! ha!'
To prove the aforesaid Frenchman wrong, we nodded to the driver's
laughter at his exquisite imitation.
He informed us that he had backed the Surrey Eleven last year, owing to
the report of a gentleman-bowler, who had done things in the way of
tumbling wickets to tickle the ears of cricketers. Gentlemen-batters
were common: gentlemen-bowlers were quite another dish. Saddlebank was
the gentleman's name.
'Old Nandrew Saddle?' Temple called to me, and we smiled at the
supposition of Saddlebank's fame, neither of us, from what we had known
of his bowling, doubting that he deserved it.
'Acquainted with him, gentlemen?' the driver inquired, touching his hat.
'Well, and I ask why don't more gentlemen take to cricket? 'stead of
horses all round the year! Now, there's my notion of happiness,' said
the man condemned to inactivity, in the perpetual act of motion; 'cricket
in cricket season! It comprises--count: lots o' running; and that's
good: just enough o' taking it easy; that's good: a appetite for your
dinner, and your ale or your Port, as may be the case; good, number
three. Add on a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow, and
you say good morning to the doctor and the parson; for you're in health
body and soul, and ne'er a parson 'll make a better Christian of ye, that
I'll swear.'
As if anxious not to pervert us, he concluded: 'That's what I think,
gentlemen.'
Temple and I talked of the ancient raptures of a first of May cricketing-
day on a sunny green meadow, with an ocean of a day before us, and well-
braced spirits for the match. I had the vision of a matronly, but not
much altered Janet, mounted on horseback, to witness the performance of
some favourite Eleven of youngsters with her connoisseur's eye; and then
the model of an English lady, wife, and mother, waving adieu to the field
and cantering home to entertain her husband's guests. Her husband!
Temple was aware of my grief, but saw no remedy. I knew that in his
heart he thought me justly punished, though he loved me.
We had a long sitting with Captain Welsh, whom I found immoveable, as I
expected I should. His men, he said, had confessed their sin similarly
to the crab in a hole, with one claw out, as the way of sinners was. He
blamed himself mainly. 'Where you have accidents, Mr. Richmond, you have
faults; and where you have faults aboard a ship you may trace a line to
the captain. I should have treated my ship's crew like my conscience,
and gone through them nightly. As it is, sir, here comes round one of
your accidents to tell me I have lived blinded by conceit. That is my
affliction, my young friend. The payment of the money is no more so than
to restore money held in trust.'
Temple and I argued the case with him, as of old on our voyage, on board
the barque Priscilla, quite unavailingly.
'Is a verdict built on lies one that my Maker approves of?' said he.
'If I keep possession of that money, my young friends, will it clothe me?
Ay, with stings! Will it feed me? Ay, with poison. And they that
should be having it shiver and want!'
He was emphatic, as he would not have been, save to read us an example,
owing to our contention with him. 'The money is Satan in my very hands!'
When he had dismissed the subject he never returned to it.
His topic of extreme happiness, to which Temple led him, was the rescue
of a beautiful sinner from a life of shame. It appeared that Captain
Welsh had the habit between his voyages of making one holiday expedition
to the spot of all creation he thought the fairest, Richmond Hill,
overlooking the Thames; and there, one evening, he espied a lady in
grief, and spoke to her, and gave her consolation. More, he gave her a
blameless home. The lady's name was Mabel Bolton. She was in distress
of spirit rather than of circumstances, for temptation was thick about
one so beautiful, to supply the vanities and luxuries of the father of
sin. He described her.
She was my first playfellow, the miller's daughter of Dipwell, Mabel
Sweetwinter, taken from her home by Lord Edbury during my German
university career, and now put away by him upon command of his family on
the eve of his marriage.
She herself related her history to me, after telling me that she had seen
me once at the steps of Edbury's Club. Our meeting was no great surprise
to either of us. She had heard my name as that of an expected visitor;
she had seen Temple, moreover, and he had prompted me with her Christian
name and the praise of her really glorious hair, to anticipate the person
who was ushered into the little cabin-like parlour by Captain Welsh's
good old mother.
Of Edbury she could not speak for grief, believing that he loved her
still and was acting under compulsion. Her long and faithful attachment
to the scapegrace seemed to preserve her from the particular regrets
Captain Welsh supposed to occupy her sinner's mind; so that, after some
minutes of the hesitation and strangeness due to our common
recollections, she talked of him simply and well--as befitted her
situation, a worldling might say. But she did not conceal her relief in
escaping to this quaint little refuge (she threw a kindly-comical look,
not overtoned, at the miniature ships on the mantelpiece, and the picture
of Joseph leading Mary with her babe on the ass) from the temptations I
could imagine a face like hers would expose her to. The face was
splendid, the figure already overblown. I breathed some thanks to my
father while she and I conversed apart. The miller was dead, her brother
in America. She had no other safe home than the one Captain Welsh had
opened to her. When I asked her (I had no excuse for it) whether she
would consent to go to Edbury again, she reddened and burst into tears.
I cursed my brutality. 'Let her cry,' said Captain Welsh on parting with
us at his street door. 'Tears are the way of women and their comfort.'
To our astonishment he told us he intended to take her for a voyage in
the Priscilla. 'Why?' we asked.
'I take her,' he said, 'because not to do things wholly is worse than not
to do things at all, for it 's waste of time and cause for a chorus
below, down in hell, my young friends. The woman is beautiful as
Solomon's bride. She is weak as water. And the man is wicked. He has
written to her a letter. He would have her reserved for himself, a
wedded man: such he is, or is soon to be. I am searching, and she is not
deceitful; and I am a poor man again and must go the voyage. I wrestled
with her, and by grace I conquered her to come with me of a free will,
and be out of his snares. Aboard I do not fear him, and she shall know
the mercy of the Lord on high seas.'
We grimaced a little on her behalf, but had nothing to reply.
Seeing Janet after Mabel was strange. In the latter one could perceive
the palpably suitable mate for Edbury.
I felt that my darling was insulted--no amends for it I had to keep
silent and mark the remorseless preparations going forward. Not so
Heriot. He had come over from the camp in Ireland on leave at this
juncture. His talk of women still suggested the hawk with the downy
feathers of the last little plucked bird sticking to his beak; but his
appreciation of Janet and some kindness for me made him a vehement
opponent of her resolve. He took licence of his friendship to lay every
incident before her, to complete his persuasions. She resisted his
attacks, as I knew she would, obstinately, and replied to his entreaties
with counter-supplications that he should urge me to accept old
Riversley. The conflicts went on between those two daily, and I heard of
them from Heriot at night. He refused to comprehend her determination
under the head of anything save madness. Varied by reproaches of me for
my former inveterate blindness, he raved upon Janet's madness
incessantly, swearing that he would not be beaten. I told him his
efforts were useless, but thought them friendly, and so they were, only
Janet's resistance had fired his vanity, and he stalked up and down my
room talking a mixture of egregious coxcombry and hearty good sense that
might have shown one the cause he meant to win had become personal to
him. Temple, who was sometimes in consultation with him, and was always
amused by his quasi-fanfaronade, assured me that Herriot was actually
scheming. The next we heard of him was, that he had been seen at a
whitebait hotel down the river drunk with Edbury. Janet also heard of
that, and declined to see Heriot again.
Our last days marched frightfully fast. Janet had learnt that any the
most distant allusion to her marriage day was an anguish to the man who
was not to marry her, so it was through my aunt Dorothy that I became
aware of Julia Bulsted's kindness in offering to take charge of my father
for a term. Lady Sampleman undertook to be hostess to him for one night,
the eve of Janet's nuptials. He was quiet, unlikely to give annoyance to
persons not strongly predisposed to hear sentences finished and
exclamations fall into their right places.
Adieu to my darling! There have been women well won; here was an
adorable woman well lost. After twenty years of slighting her, did I
fancy she would turn to me and throw a man over in reward of my ultimate
recovery of my senses?--or fancy that one so tenacious as she had proved
would snap a tie depending on her pledged word? She liked Edbury; she
saw the best of him, and liked him. The improved young lord was her
handiwork. After the years of humiliation from me, she had found herself
courted by a young nobleman who clung to her for help, showed
improvement, and brought her many compliments from a wondering world.
She really felt that she was strength and true life to him. She resisted
Heriot: she resisted a more powerful advocate, and this was the princess
Ottilia. My aunt Dorothy told me that the princess had written. Janet
either did or affected to weigh the princess's reasonings; and she did
not evade the task of furnishing a full reply.
Her resolution was unchanged. Loss of colour, loss of light in her eyes,
were the sole signs of what it cost her to maintain it. Our task was to
transfer the idea of Janet to that of Julia in my father's whirling
brain, which at first rebelled violently, and cast it out like a stick
thrust between rapidly revolving wheels.
The night before I was to take him away, she gave me her hand with a
'good-bye, dear Harry.' My words were much the same. She had a ghastly
face, but could not have known it, for she smiled, and tried to keep the
shallow smile in play, as friends do. There was the end.
It came abruptly, and was schoolingly cold and short.
It had the effect on me of freezing my blood and setting what seemed to
be the nerves of my brain at work in a fury of calculation to reckon the
minutes remaining of her maiden days. I had expected nothing, but now we
had parted I thought that one last scene to break my heart on should not
have been denied to me. My aunt Dorothy was a mute; she wept when I
spoke of Janet, whatever it was I said.
The minutes ran on from circumstance to circumstance of the destiny Janet
had marked for herself, each one rounded in my mind of a blood colour
like the edge about prismatic hues. I lived through them a thousand
times before they occurred, as the wretch who fears death dies
multitudinously.
Some womanly fib preserved my father from a shock on leaving Janet's
house. She left it herself at the same time that she drove him to Lady
Sampleman's, and I found him there soon after she had gone to her
bridesmaids. A letter was for me:--
'DEAR HARRY,--I shall not live at Riversley, never go there again;
do not let it be sold to a stranger; it will happen unless you go
there. For the sake of the neighbourhood and poor people, I cannot
allow it to be shut up. I was the cause of the chief misfortune.
You never blamed me. Let me think that the old place is not dead.
Adieu.
'Your affectionate,
'JANET.'
I tore the letter to pieces, and kept them.
The aspect of the new intolerable world I was to live in after to-morrow,
paralyzed sensation. My father chattered, Lady Sampleman hushed him; she
said I might leave him to her, and I went down to Captain Welsh to bid
him good-bye and get such peace as contact with a man clad in armour
proof against earthly calamity could give.
I was startled to see little Kiomi in Mabel's company.
They had met accidentally at the head of the street, and had been friends
in childhood, Captain Welsh said, adding: 'She hates men.'
'Good reason, when they're beasts,' said Kiomi.
Amid much weeping of Mabel and old Mrs. Welsh, Kiomi showed as little
trouble as the heath when the woods are swept.
Captain Welsh wanted Mabel to be on board early, owing, he told me, to
information. Kiomi had offered to remain on board with her until the
captain was able to come. He had business to do in the City.
We saw them off from the waterside.
'Were I to leave that young woman behind me, on shore, I should be giving
the devil warrant to seize upon his prey,' said Captain Welsh, turning
his gaze from the boat which conveyed Kiomi and Mabel to the barque
Priscilla. He had information that the misleader of her youth was
hunting her.
He and I parted, and for ever, at a corner of crossways in the central
city. There I saw the last of one who deemed it as simple a matter to
renounce his savings for old age, to rectify an error of justice, as to
plant his foot on the pavement; a man whose only burden was the folly of
men.
I thought to myself in despair, under what protest can I also escape from
England and my own intemperate mind? It seemed a miraculous answer:--
There lay at my chambers a note written by Count Kesensky; I went to the
embassy, and heard of an Austrian ship of war being at one of our ports
upon an expedition to the East, and was introduced to the captain, a
gentlemanly fellow, like most of the officers of his Government. Finding
in me a German scholar, and a joyful willingness, he engaged me to take
the post of secretary to the expedition in the place of an invalided
Freiherr von Redwitz. The bargain was struck immediately: I was to be
ready to report myself to the captain on board not later than the
following day. Count Kesensky led me aside: he regretted that he could
do nothing better for me: but I thought his friendliness extreme and
astonishing, and said so; whereupon the count assured me that his
intentions were good, though he had not been of great use hitherto--an
allusion to the borough of Chippenden he had only heard of von Redwitz's
illness that afternoon. I thanked him cordially, saying I was much in
his debt, and he bowed me out, letting me fancy, as my father had fancied
before me, and as though I had never observed and reflected in my life,
that the opportuneness of this intervention signified a special action of
Providence.
The flattery of the thought served for an elixir. But with whom would my
father abide during my absence? Captain Bulsted and Julia saved me from
a fit of remorse; they had come up to town on purpose to carry him home
with them, and had left a message on my table, and an invitation to
dinner at their hotel, where the name of Janet was the Marino Faliero of
our review of Riversley people and old times. The captain and his wife
were indignant at her conduct. Since, however, I chose to excuse it,
they said they would say nothing more about her, and she was turned face
to the wall. I told them how Janet had taken him for months. 'But I 'll
take him for years,' said Julia. 'The truth is, Harry, my old dear!
William and I are never so united--for I'm ashamed to quarrel with him--
as when your father's at Bulsted. He belongs to us, and other people
shall know you 're not obliged to depend on your family for help, and
your aunt Dorothy can come and see him whenever she likes.'
That was settled. Captain Bulsted went with me to Lady Sampleman's to
prepare my father for the change of nurse and residence. We were
informed that he had gone down with Alderman Duke Saddlebank to dine at
one of the great City Companies' halls. I could hardly believe it. 'Ah!
my dear Mr. Harry,' said Lady Sampleman, 'old friends know one another
best, believe that, now. I treated him as if he was as well as ever he
was, gave him his turtle and madeira lunch; and Alderman Saddlebank, who
lunched here--your father used to say, he looks like a robin hopping out
of a larderquite jumped to dine him in the City like old times; and he
will see a great spread of plate!'
She thought my father only moderately unwell, wanting novelty. Captain
Bulsted agreed with me that it would be prudent to go and fetch him. At
the door of the City hall stood Andrew Saddlebank, grown to be simply a
larger edition of Rippenger's head boy, and he imparted to us that my
father was 'on his legs' delivering a speech: It alarmed me. With
Saddlebank's assistance I pushed in.
'A prince! a treacherous lover! an unfatherly man!'
Those were the words I caught: a reproduction of many of my phrases
employed in our arguments on this very subject.
He bade his audience to beware of princes, beware of idle princes; and
letting his florid fancy loose on these eminent persons, they were at one
moment silver lamps, at another poising hawks, and again sprawling
pumpkins; anything except useful citizens. How could they be? They had
the attraction of the lamp, the appetite of the hawk, the occupation of
the pumpkin: nothing was given them to do but to shine, destroy, and
fatten. Their hands were kept empty: a trifle in their heads would
topple them over; they were monuments of the English system of
compromise. Happy for mankind if they were monuments only! Happy for
them! But they had the passions of men. The adulation of the multitude
was raised to inflate them, whose self-respect had not one prop to rest
an, unless it were contempt for the flatterers and prophetic foresight of
their perfidy. They were the monuments of a compromise between the past
and terror of the future; puppets as princes, mannikins as men, the
snares of frail women, stop-gaps of the State, feathered nonentities!
So far (but not in epigram) he marshalled the things he had heard to his
sound of drum and trumpet, like one repeating a lesson off-hand.
Steering on a sudden completely round, he gave his audience an outline of
the changes he would have effected had he but triumphed in his cause; and
now came the lashing of arms, a flood of eloquence. Princes with brains,
princes leaders, princes flowers of the land, he had offered them!
princes that should sway assemblies, and not stultify the precepts of a
decent people 'by making you pay in the outrage of your morals for what
you seem to gain in policy.' These or similar words. The whole scene
was too grotesque and afflicting. But his command of his hearers was
extraordinary, partly a consolation I thought, until, having touched the
arm of one of the gentlemen of the banquet and said, ' I am his son; I
wish to remove him,' the reply enlightened me: 'I 'm afraid there's
danger in interrupting him; I really am.'
They were listening obediently to one whom they dared not interrupt for
fear of provoking an outburst of madness.
I had to risk it. His dilated eyes looked ready to seize on me for an
illustration. I spoke peremptorily, and he bowed his head low, saying,
'My son, gentlemen,' and submitted himself to my hands. The feasters
showed immediately that they felt released by rising and chatting in
groups. Alderman Saddlebank expressed much gratitude to me for the
service I had performed. 'That first half of your father's speech was
the most pathetic thing I ever heard!' I had not shared his privilege,
and could not say. The remark was current that a great deal was true of
what had been said of the Fitzs. My father leaned heavily on my arm with
the step and bent head of an ancient pensioner of the Honourable City
Company. He was Julia Bulsted's charge, and I was on board the foreign
vessel weighing anchor from England before dawn of Janet's marriage-day.
CHAPTER LVI
CONCLUSION
The wind was high that morning. The rain came in gray rings, through
which we worked on the fretted surface of crumbling seas, heaving up and
plunging, without an outlook.
I remember having thought of the barque Priscilla as I watched our lithe
Dalmatians slide along the drenched decks of the Verona frigate. At
night it blew a gale. I could imagine it to have been sent
providentially to brush the torture of the land from my mind, and make me
feel that men are trifles.
What are their passions, then? The storm in the clouds--even more short-
lived than the clouds.
I philosophized, but my anguish was great.
Janet's 'Good-bye, Harry,' ended everything I lived for, and seemed to
strike the day, and bring out of it the remorseless rain. A featureless
day, like those before the earth was built; like night under an angry
moon; and each day the same until we touched the edge of a southern
circle and saw light, and I could use my brain.
The matter most present to me was my injustice regarding my poor father's
speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much that I
generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or provoked some
pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly recollection divest
the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart. It was true that he
had in his blind way struck the keynote of his position, much as I myself
had conceived it before. Harsh trials had made me think of my own
fortunes more than of his. This I felt, and I thought there never had
been so moving a speech. It seemed to make the world in debt to us.
What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?
In reality the busy little creature within me, whom we call self, was
digging pits for comfort to flow in, of any kind, in any form; and it
seized on every idea, every circumstance, to turn it to that purpose, and
with such success, that when by-and-by I learnt how entirely inactive
special Providence had been in my affairs, I had to collect myself before
I could muster the conception of gratitude toward the noble woman who
clothed me in the illusion. It was to the Princess Ottilia, acting
through Count Kesensky, that I owed both my wafting away from England at
a wretched season, and that chance of a career in Parliament! The
captain of the Verona hinted as much when, after a year of voyaging, we
touched at an East Indian seaport, and von Redwitz joined the vessel to
resume the post I was occupying. Von Redwitz (the son of Prince Ernest's
Chancellor, I discovered) could have told me more than he did, but he
handed me a letter from the princess, calling me home urgently, and even
prescribing my route, and bidding me come straight to Germany and to
Sarkeld. The summons was distasteful, for I had settled into harness
under my scientific superiors, and had proved to my messmates that I was
neither morose nor over-conceited. Captain Martinitz persuaded me to
return, and besides, there lay between the lines of Ottilia's letter a
signification of welcome things better guessed at than known. Was I not
bound to do her bidding? Others had done it: young von Redwitz, for
instance, in obeying the telegraph wires and feigning sickness to
surrender his place to me, when she wished to save me from misery by
hurrying me to new scenes with a task for my hand and head;--no mean
stretch of devotion on his part. Ottilia was still my princess; she my
providence. She wrote:
'Come home, my friend Harry: you have been absent too long. He who
intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel,
and you nearer home. The home is always here where I am, but it may now
take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now
really loss of life. I tell you no more. You know me, that when I say
come, it is enough.'
A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter. Not a word of
Prince Hermann. What had happened? I guessed at it curiously and
incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope
as soon as I seemed to have divined it. I did not wrong my soul's high
mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in
perplexity struck at impossibilities. Ottilia would never have summoned
me to herself. But was Janet free? The hope which refused to live in
that other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the bare
thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset it.
Had my girl's courage failed, to spare her at the last moment? I fancied
it might be: I was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on me with
the force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the
little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me
back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well. It
cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.