The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, v3

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THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL

By George Meredith

1905

BOOK 3.

XXI. RICHARD IS SUMMONED TO TOWN TO HEAR A SERMON
XXII. INDICATES THE APPROACHES OF FEVER
XXIII. CRISIS IN THE APPLE-DISEASE
XXIV. OF THE SPRING PRIMROSE AND THE AUTUMNAL
XXV. IN WHICH THE HERO TAKES A STEP
XXVI. RECORDS THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF THE HERO
XXVII. CONTAINS AN INTERCESSION FOR THE HEROINE

CHAPTER XXI

By twelve o'clock at noon next day the inhabitants of Raynham Abbey knew
that Berry, the baronet's man, had arrived post-haste from town, with
orders to conduct Mr. Richard thither, and that Mr. Richard had refused
to go, had sworn he would not, defied his father, and despatched Berry to
the Shades. Berry was all that Benson was not. Whereas Benson hated
woman, Berry admired her warmly. Second to his own stately person, woman
occupied his reflections, and commanded his homage. Berry was of
majestic port, and used dictionary words. Among the maids of Raynham his
conscious calves produced all the discord and the frenzy those adornments
seem destined to create in tender bosoms. He had, moreover, the
reputation of having suffered for the sex; which assisted his object in
inducing the sex to suffer for him. What with his calves, and his
dictionary words, and the attractive halo of the mysterious
vindictiveness of Venus surrounding him, this Adonis of the lower
household was a mighty man below, and he moved as one.

On hearing the tumult that followed Berry's arrival, Adrian sent for him,
and was informed of the nature of his mission, and its result.

"You should come to me first," said Adrian. "I should have imagined you
were shrewd enough for that, Berry?"

"Pardon me, Mr. Adrian," Berry doubled his elbow to explain. "Pardon me,
sir. Acting recipient of special injunctions I was not a free agent."

"Go to Mr. Richard again, Berry. There will be a little confusion if he
holds back. Perhaps you had better throw out a hint or so of apoplexy.
A slight hint will do. And here--Berry! when you return to town, you
had better not mention anything--to quote Johnson--of Benson's
spiflication."

"Certainly not, sir."

The wise youth's hint had the desired effect on Richard.

He dashed off a hasty letter by Tom to Belthorpe, and, mounting his
horse, galloped to the Bellingham station.

Sir Austin was sitting down to a quiet early dinner at his hotel, when
the Hope of Raynham burst into his room.

The baronet was not angry with his son. On the contrary, for he was
singularly just and self-accusing while pride was not up in arms, he had
been thinking all day after the receipt of Benson's letter that he was
deficient in cordiality, and did not, by reason of his excessive anxiety,
make himself sufficiently his son's companion: was not enough, as he
strove to be, mother and father to him.; preceptor and friend; previsor
and associate. He had not to ask his conscience where he had lately been
to blame towards the System. He had slunk away from Raynham in the very
crisis of the Magnetic Age, and this young woman of the parish (as Benson
had termed sweet Lucy in his letter) was the consequence.

Yes! pride and sensitiveness were his chief foes, and he would trample on
them. To begin, he embraced his son: hard upon an Englishman at any
time--doubly so to one so shamefaced at emotion in cool blood, as it
were. It gave him a strange pleasure, nevertheless. And the youth
seemed to answer to it; he was excited. Was his love, then, beginning to
correspond with his father's as in those intimate days before the
Blossoming Season?

But when Richard, inarticulate at first in his haste, cried out,
"My dear, dear father! You are safe! I feared--You are better, sir?
Thank God!" Sir Austin stood away from him.

"Safe?" he said. "What has alarmed you?"

Instead of replying, Richard dropped into a chair, and seized his hand
and kissed it.

Sir Austin took a seat, and waited for his son to explain.

"Those doctors are such fools!" Richard broke out. "I was sure they were
wrong. They don't know headache from apoplexy. It's worth the ride,
sir, to see you. You left Raynham so suddenly.--But you are well!
It was not an attack of real apoplexy?"

His father's brows contorted, and he said, No, it was not. Richard
pursued:

"If you were ill, I couldn't come too soon, though, if coroners' inquests
sat on horses, those doctors would be found guilty of mare-slaughter.
Cassandra'll be knocked up. I was too early for the train at Bellingham,
and I wouldn't wait. She did the distance in four hours and three-
quarters. Pretty good, sir, wasn't it?"

"It has given you appetite for dinner, I hope," said the baronet, not so
well pleased to find that it was not simple obedience that had brought
the youth to him in such haste.

"I'm ready," replied Richard. "I shall be in time to return by the last
train to-night. I will leave Cassandra in your charge for a rest."

His father quietly helped him to soup, which he commenced gobbling with
an eagerness that might pass for appetite.

"All well at Raynham?" said the baronet.

"Quite, sir."

"Nothing new?"

"Nothing, sir."

"The same as when I left?"

"No change whatever!"

"I shall be glad to get back to the old place," said the baronet. "My
stay in town has certainly been profitable. I have made some pleasant
acquaintances who may probably favour us with a visit there in the late
autumn--people you may be pleased to know. They are very anxious to see
Raynham."

"I love the old place," cried Richard. "I never wish to leave it."

"Why, boy, before I left you were constantly begging to see town."

"Was I, sir? How odd! Well! I don't want to remain here. I've seen
enough of it."

"How did you find your way to me?"

Richard laughed, and related his bewilderment at the miles of brick, and
the noise, and the troops of people, concluding, "There's no place like
home!"

The baronet watched his symptomatic brilliant eyes, and favoured him with
a double-dealing sentence--

"To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half traversed the world,
is youth's foolishness, my son. Reverence time! A better maxim that
than your Horatian."

"He knows all!" thought Richard, and instantly drew away leagues from his
father, and threw up fortifications round his love and himself.

Dinner over, Richard looked hurriedly at his watch, and said, with much
briskness, "I shall just be in time, sir, if we walk. Will you come with
me to the station?"

The baronet did not answer.

Richard was going to repeat the question, but found his father's eyes
fixed on him so meaningly that he wavered, and played with his empty
glass.

"I think we will have a little more claret," said the baronet.

Claret was brought, and they were left alone.

The baronet then drew within arm's-reach of his son, and began:

"I am not aware what you may have thought of me, Richard, during the
years we have lived together; and indeed I have never been in a hurry to
be known to you; and, if I had died before my work was done, I should not
have complained at losing half my reward, in hearing you thank me.
Perhaps, as it is, I never may. Everything, save selfishness, has its
recompense. I shall be content if you prosper."

He fetched a breath and continued: "You had in your infancy a great
loss." Father and son coloured simultaneously. "To make that good to
you I chose to isolate myself from the world, and devote myself entirely
to your welfare; and I think it is not vanity that tells me now that the
son I have reared is one of the most hopeful of God's creatures. But for
that very reason you are open to be tempted the most, and to sink the
deepest. It was the first of the angels who made the road to hell."

He paused again. Richard fingered at his watch.

"In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood. We go to wreck very
easily. It sounds like superstition; I cannot but think we are tried as
most men are not. I see it in us all. And you, my son, are compounded
of two races. Your passions are violent. You have had a taste of
revenge. You have seen, in a small way, that the pound of flesh draws
rivers of blood. But there is now in you another power. You are
mounting to the table-land of life, where mimic battles are changed to
real ones. And you come upon it laden equally with force to create and
to destroy." He deliberated to announce the intelligence, with deep
meaning: "There are women in the world, my son!"

The young man's heart galloped back to Raynham.

"It is when you encounter them that you are thoroughly on trial. It is
when you know them that life is either a mockery to you, or, as some find
it, a gift of blessedness. They are our ordeal. Love of any human
object is the soul's ordeal; and they are ours, loving them, or not."

The young man heard the whistle of the train. He saw the moon-lighted
wood, and the vision of his beloved. He could barely hold himself down
and listen.

"I believe," the baronet spoke with little of the cheerfulness of belief,
"good women exist."

Oh, if he knew Lucy!

"But," and he gazed on Richard intently, "it is given to very few to meet
them on the threshold--I may say, to none. We find them after hard
buffeting, and usually, when we find the one fitted for us, our madness
has misshaped our destiny, our lot is cast. For women are not the end,
but the means, of life. In youth we think them the former, and
thousands, who have not even the excuse of youth, select a mate--or
worse--with that sole view. I believe women punish us for so perverting
their uses. They punish Society."

The baronet put his hand to his brow as his mind travelled into
consequences.

'Our most diligent pupil learns not so much as an earnest teacher,' says
The Pilgrim's Scrip; and Sir Austin, in schooling himself to speak with
moderation of women, was beginning to get a glimpse of their side of the
case.

Cold Blood now touched on love to Hot Blood.

Cold Blood said, "It is a passion coming in the order of nature, the ripe
fruit of our animal being."

Hot Blood felt: "It is a divinity! All that is worth living for in the
world."

Cold Blood said: "It is a fever which tests our strength, and too often
leads to perdition."

Hot Blood felt: "Lead whither it will, I follow it."

Cold Blood said: "It is a name men and women are much in the habit of
employing to sanctify their appetites."

Hot Blood felt: "It is worship; religion; life!"

And so the two parallel lines ran on.

The baronet became more personal:

"You know my love for you, my son. The extent of it you cannot know; but
you must know that it is something very deep, and--I do not wish to speak
of it--but a father must sometimes petition for gratitude, since the only
true expression of it is his son's moral good. If you care for my love,
or love me in return, aid me with all your energies to keep you what I
have made you, and guard you from the snares besetting you. It was in my
hands once. It is ceasing to be so. Remember, my son, what my love is.
It is different, I fear, with most fathers: but I am bound up in your
welfare: what you do affects me vitally. You will take no step that is
not intimate with my happiness, or my misery. And I have had great
disappointments, my son."

So far it was well. Richard loved his father, and even in his frenzied
state he could not without emotion hear him thus speak.

Unhappily, the baronet, who by some fatality never could see when he was
winning the battle, thought proper in his wisdom to water the dryness of
his sermon with a little jocoseness, on the subject of young men fancying
themselves in love, and, when they were raw and green, absolutely wanting
to be--that most awful thing, which the wisest and strongest of men
undertake in hesitation and after self-mortification and penance--
married! He sketched the Foolish Young Fellow--the object of general
ridicule and covert contempt. He sketched the Woman--the strange thing
made in our image, and with all our faculties--passing to the rule of one
who in taking her proved that he could not rule himself, and had no
knowledge of her save as a choice morsel which he would burn the whole
world, and himself in the bargain, to possess. He harped upon the
Foolish Young Fellow, till the foolish young fellow felt his skin tingle
and was half suffocated with shame and rage.

After this, the baronet might be as wise as he pleased: he had quite
undone his work. He might analyze Love and anatomize Woman. He might
accord to her her due position, and paint her fair: he might be shrewd,
jocose, gentle, pathetic, wonderfully wise: he spoke to deaf ears.

Closing his sermon with the question, softly uttered: "Have you anything
to tell me, Richard?" and hoping for a confession, and a thorough re-
establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him cold: "I have
not."

The baronet relapsed in his chair, and made diagrams of his fingers.

Richard turned his back on further dialogue by going to the window. In
the section of sky over the street twinkled two or three stars; shining
faintly, feeling the moon. The moon was rising: the woods were lifting
up to her: his star of the woods would be there. A bed of moss set about
flowers in a basket under him breathed to his nostril of the woodland
keenly, and filled him with delirious longing.

A succession of hard sighs brought his father's hand on his shoulder.

"You have nothing you could say to me, my son? Tell me, Richard!
Remember, there is no home for the soul where dwells a shadow of
untruth!"

"Nothing at all, sir," the young man replied, meeting him with the full
orbs of his eyes.

The baronet withdrew his hand, and paced the room.

At last it grew impossible for Richard to control his impatience, and he
said: "Do you intend me to stay here, sir? Am I not to return to Raynham
at all to-night?"

His father was again falsely jocular:

"What? and catch the train after giving it ten minutes' start?"

"Cassandra will take me," said the young man earnestly. "I needn't ride
her hard, sir. Or perhaps you would lend me your Winkelried? I should
be down with him in little better than three hours."

"Even then, you know, the park-gates would be locked."

"Well, I could stable him in the village. Dowling knows the horse, and
would treat him properly. May I have him, sir?"

The cloud cleared off Richard's face as he asked. At least, if he missed
his love that night he would be near her, breathing the same air, marking
what star was above her bedchamber, hearing the hushed night-talk of the
trees about her dwelling: looking on the distances that were like hope
half fulfilled and a bodily presence bright as Hesper, since he knew her.
There were two swallows under the eaves shadowing Lucy's chamber-windows:
two swallows, mates in one nest, blissful birds, who twittered and cheep-
cheeped to the sole-lying beauty in her bed. Around these birds the
lover's heart revolved, he knew not why. He associated them with all his
close-veiled dreams of happiness. Seldom a morning passed when he did
not watch them leave the nest on their breakfast-flight, busy in the
happy stillness of dawn. It seemed to him now that if he could be at
Raynham to see them in to-morrow's dawn he would be compensated for his
incalculable loss of to-night: he would forgive and love his father,
London, the life, the world. Just to see those purple backs and white
breasts flash out into the quiet morning air! He wanted no more.

The baronet's trifling had placed this enormous boon within the young
man's visionary grasp.

He still went on trying the boy's temper.

"You know there would be nobody ready for you at Raynham. It is unfair
to disturb the maids."

Richard overrode every objection.

"Well, then, my son," said the baronet, preserving his
half-jocular air, "I must tell you that it is my wish to have you in
town."

"Then you have not been ill at all, sir!" cried Richard, as in his
despair he seized the whole plot.

"I have been as well as you could have desired me to be," said his
father.

"Why did they lie to me?" the young man wrathfully exclaimed.

"I think, Richard, you can best answer that," rejoined Sir Austin, kindly
severe.

Dread of being signalized as the Foolish Young Fellow prevented Richard
from expostulating further. Sir Austin saw him grinding his passion into
powder for future explosion, and thought it best to leave him for awhile.

CHAPTER XXII

For three weeks Richard had to remain in town and endure the teachings of
the System in a new atmosphere. He had to sit and listen to men of
science who came to renew their intimacy with his father, and whom of all
men his father wished him to respect and study; practically scientific
men being, in the baronet's estimation, the only minds thoroughly mated
and enviable. He had to endure an introduction to the Grandisons, and
meet the eyes of his kind, haunted as he was by the Foolish Young Fellow.
The idea that he might by any chance be identified with him held the poor
youth in silent subjection. And it was horrible. For it was a continued
outrage on the fair image he had in his heart. The notion of the world
laughing at him because he loved sweet Lucy stung him to momentary
frenzies, and developed premature misanthropy in his spirit. Also the
System desired to show him whither young women of the parish lead us, and
he was dragged about at nighttime to see the sons and daughters of
darkness, after the fashion prescribed to Mr. Thompson; how they danced
and ogled down the high road to perdition. But from this sight possibly
the teacher learnt more than his pupil, since we find him seriously
asking his meditative hours, in the Note-book: "Wherefore Wild Oats are
only of one gender?" a question certainly not suggested to him at
Raynham; and again--"Whether men might not be attaching too rigid an
importance?"...to a subject with a dotted tail apparently, for he gives
it no other in the Note-book. But, as I apprehend, he had come to plead
in behalf of women here, and had deduced something from positive
observation. To Richard the scenes he witnessed were strange wild
pictures, likely if anything to have increased his misanthropy, but for
his love.

Certain sweet little notes from Lucy sustained the lover during the first
two weeks of exile. They ceased; and now Richard fell into such
despondency that his father in alarm had to take measures to hasten their
return to Raynham. At the close of the third week Berry laid a pair of
letters, bearing the Raynham post-mark, on the breakfast-table, and,
after reading one attentively, the baronet asked his son if he was
inclined to quit the metropolis.

"For Raynham, air?" cried Richard, and relapsed, saying, "As you will!"
aware that he had given a glimpse of the Foolish Young Fellow.

Berry accordingly received orders to make arrangements for their instant
return to Raynham.

The letter Sir Austin lifted his head from to bespeak his son's wishes
was a composition of the wise youth Adrian's, and ran thus:

"Benson is doggedly recovering. He requires great indemnities. Happy
when a faithful fool is the main sufferer in a household! I quite agree
with you that our faithful fool is the best servant of great schemes.
Benson is now a piece of history. I tell him that this is indemnity
enough, and that the sweet Muse usually insists upon gentlemen being
half-flayed before she will condescend to notice them; but Benson, I
regret to say, rejects the comfort so fine a reflection should offer, and
had rather keep his skin and live opaque. Heroism seems partly a matter
of training. Faithful folly is Benson's nature: the rest has been thrust
upon.

"The young person has resigned the neighbourhood. I had an interview
with the fair Papist myself, and also with the man Blaize. They were
both sensible, though one swore and the other sighed. She is pretty. I
hope she does not paint. I can affirm that her legs are strong, for she
walks to Bellingham twice a week to take her Scarlet bath, when, having
confessed and been made clean by the Romish unction, she walks back the
brisker, of which my Protestant muscular systems is yet aware. It was on
the road to Bellingham I engaged her. She is well in the matter of hair.
Madam Godiva might challenge her, it would be a fair match. Has it never
struck you that Woman is nearer the vegetable than Man?--Mr. Blaize
intends her for his son a junction that every lover of fairy mythology
must desire to see consummated. Young Tom is heir to all the agremens of
the Beast. The maids of Lobourne say (I hear) that he is a very Proculus
among them. Possibly the envious men say it for the maids. Beauty does
not speak bad grammar--and altogether she is better out of the way."

The other letter was from Lady Blandish, a lady's letter, and said:

"I have fulfilled your commission to the best of my ability, and heartily
sad it has made me. She is indeed very much above her station--pity that
it is so! She is almost beautiful--quite beautiful at times, and not in
any way what you have been led to fancy. The poor child had no story to
tell. I have again seen her, and talked with her for an hour as kindly
as I could. I could gather nothing more than we know. It is just a
woman's history as it invariably commences. Richard is the god of her
idolatry. She will renounce him, and sacrifice herself for his sake.
Are we so bad? She asked me what she was to do. She would do whatever
was imposed upon her--all but pretend to love another, and that she never
would, and, I believe, never will. You know I am sentimental, and I
confess we dropped a few tears together. Her uncle has sent her for the
Winter to the institution where it appears she was educated, and where
they are very fond of her and want to keep her, which it would be a good
thing if they were to do. The man is a good sort of man. She was
entrusted to him by her father, and he never interferes with her
religion, and is very scrupulous about all that pertains to it, though,
as he says, he is a Christian himself. In the Spring (but the poor child
does not know this) she is to come back, and be married to his lout of a
son. I am determined to prevent that. May I not reckon on your promise
to aid me? When you see her, I am sure you will. It would be sacrilege
to look on and permit such a thing. You know, they are cousins. She
asked me, where in the world there was one like Richard? What could I
answer? They were your own words, and spoken with a depth of conviction!
I hope he is really calm. I shudder to think of him when he comes, and
discovers what I have been doing. I hope I have been really doing right!
A good deed, you say, never dies; but we cannot always know--I must rely
on you. Yes, it is; I should think, easy to suffer martyrdom when one is
sure of one's cause! but then one must be sure of it. I have done
nothing lately but to repeat to myself that saying of yours, No. 54, C.
7, P.S.; and it has consoled me, I cannot say why, except that all wisdom
consoles, whether it applies directly or not:

"'For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained to Him; that
they cling to Him with their Weakness, not with their Strength.'

"I like to know of what you are thinking when you composed this or that
saying--what suggested it. May not one be admitted to inspect the
machinery of wisdom? I feel curious to know how thoughts--real thoughts
--are born. Not that I hope to win the secret. Here is the beginning of
one (but we poor women can never put together even two of the three ideas
which you say go to form a thought): 'When a wise man makes a false step,
will he not go farther than a fool?' It has just flitted through me.

"I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the
readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep
referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal.
How different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from the
thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do
reverence him). But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet
I do not feel the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the desert,
savage and beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine a superior
donkey reclaimed from the heathen to be--a very superior donkey, I mean,
with great power of speech and great natural complacency, and whose
stubbornness you must admire as part of his mission. The worst is that
no one will imagine anything sublime in a superior donkey, so my simile
is unfair and false. Is it not strange? I love Wordsworth best, and yet
Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?"

("Because," Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, "women are
cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts
to Excellence and Nature's Inspiration.")

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