‘M-m-m-m rascal!’ hummed the squire. ‘There’s three, and that’s not enough for him. Six months back a man comes over from Surreywards, a farm he calls Dipwell, and asks after you, Harry; rigmaroles about a handsome lass gone off . . . some scoundrel ! You and I’ll talk it over by-and-by, Harry.’
Janet raised and let fall her eyebrows. The fiction, that so much having been said, an immediate show of reserve on such topics preserved her in ignorance of them, was one she subscribed to merely to humour the squire. I was half in doubt whether I disliked or admired her want of decent hypocrisy. She allowed him to suppose that she did not hear, but spoke as a party to the conversation. My aunt Dorothy blamed Julia. The squire thundered at Heriot; Janet, liking both, contented herself with impartial comments.
‘I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,’ she said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all things in it. We rode over to Julia’s cottage, on the outskirts of the estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly bewitching lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the captain was doing, serving his country in foreign parts, while such as these were shining without a captain at home. Janet approved his conduct, and was right. ‘What can a wife think the man worth who sits down to guard his house-door?’ she answered my slight innuendo. She compared the man to a kennel-dog. ‘This,’ said I, ‘comes of made-up matches,’ whereat she was silent.
Julia took her own view of her position. She asked me whether it was not dismal for one who was called a grass widow, and was in reality a salt- water one, to keep fresh, with a lapdog, a cook, and a maid-servant, and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for twice that he opened it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing creature day after day! At first she was shy, stole out a coy line of fingers to be shaken, and lisped; and out of that mood came right-about-face, with an exclamation of regret that she supposed she must not kiss me now. I projected, she drew back. ‘Shall Janet go?’ said I. ‘Then if nobody’s present I ‘ll be talked of,’ said she, moaning queerly. The tendency of her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her handsome face an aspect deliriously wild. I complimented her on her keeping so fresh, in spite of her salt-water widowhood. She turned the tables on me for looking so powerful, though I was dying for a foreign princess.
‘Oh! but that’ll blow over,’ she said; ‘anything blows over as long as you don’t go up to the altar’; and she eyed her ringed finger, woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her William. Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire and the other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping. ‘And if you get Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it’ll be better for him, I’m sure,’ she added, and naively:
‘I ‘d like to meet him up at the Grange.’ Temple, she said, had left the Navy and was reading in London for the Bar–good news to me.
‘You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,’ Janet observed on the ride home.
‘Do you take her for a real person, Janet?’
‘One thinks of her as a snow-mountain you’ve been admiring.’
‘Very well; so let her be.’
‘Is she kind and good?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does she ride well?’
‘She rides remarkably well.’
‘She ‘s fair, I suppose?’
‘Janet, if I saw you married to Temple, it would be the second great wish of my heart.’
‘Harry, you’re a bit too cruel, as Julia would say.’
‘Have you noticed she gets more and more Irish?’
‘Perhaps she finds it is liked. Some women can adapt themselves . . . they ‘re the happiest. All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess is like the rest of us?’
‘Not at all,’ said I, unconscious of hurting.
‘Never mind. Don’t be hard on Julia. She has the making of a good woman–a girl can see that; only she can’t bear loneliness, and doesn’t understand yet what it is to be loved by a true gentleman. Persons of that class can’t learn it all at once.’
I was pained to see her in tears. Her figure was straight, and she spoke without a quaver of her voice.
‘Heriot’s an excellent fellow,’ I remarked.
‘He is. I can’t think ill of my friends,’ said she.
‘Dear girl, is it these two who make you unhappy?’
‘No; but dear old grandada! . . .’
The course of her mind was obvious. I would rather have had her less abrupt and more personal in revealing it. I stammered something.
‘Heriot does not know you as I do,’ she said, strangling a whimper. ‘I was sure it was serious, though one’s accustomed to associate princesses with young men’s dreams. I fear, Harry, it will half break our dear old grandada’s heart. He is rough, and you have often been against him, for one unfortunate reason. If you knew him as I do you would pity him sincerely. He hardly grumbled at all at your terribly long absence. Poor old man! he hopes on.’
‘He’s incurably unjust to my father.’
‘Your father has been with you all the time, Harry? I guessed it.’
‘Well?’
‘It generally bodes no good to the Grange. Do pardon me for saying that. I know nothing of him; I know only that the squire is generous, and THAT I stand for with all my might. Forgive me for what I said.’
‘Forgive you–with all my heart. I like you all the better. You ‘re a brave partisan. I don’t expect women to be philosophers.’
‘Well, Harry, I would take your side as firmly as anybody’s.’
‘Do, then; tell the squire how I am situated.’
‘Ah!’ she half sighed, ‘I knew this was coming.’
‘How could it other than come? You can do what you like with the squire. I’m dependent on him, and I am betrothed to the Princess Ottilia. God knows how much she has to trample down on her part. She casts off–to speak plainly, she puts herself out of the line of succession, and for whom? for me. In her father’s lifetime she will hardly yield me her hand; but I must immediately be in a position to offer mine. She may: who can tell? she is above all women in power and firmness. You talk of generosity; could there be a higher example of it?’
‘I daresay; I know nothing of princesses,’ Janet murmured. ‘I don’t quite comprehend what she has done. The point is, what am I to do?’
‘Prepare him for it. Soothe him in advance. Why, dear Janet, you can reconcile him to anything in a minute.’
‘Lie to him downright?’
‘Now what on earth is the meaning of that, and why can’t you speak mildly?’
‘I suppose I speak as I feel. I’m a plain speaker, a plain person. You don’t give me an easy task, friend Harry.’
‘If you believe in his generosity, Janet, should you be afraid to put it to proof?’
‘Grandada’s generosity, Harry? I do believe in it as I believe in my own life. It happens to be the very thing I must keep myself from rousing in him, to be of any service to you. Look at the old house!’ She changed her tone. ‘Looking on old Riversley with the eyes of my head even, I think I’m looking at something far away in the memory. Perhaps the deep red brick causes it. There never was a house with so many beautiful creepers. Bright as they are, you notice the roses on the wall. There’s a face for me forever from every window; and good-bye, Riversley ! Harry, I’ll obey your wishes.’
So saying, she headed me, trotting down the heath-track.
CHAPTER XXXVII
JANET RENOUNCES ME
An illness of old Sewis, the butler,–amazingly resembling a sick monkey in his bed,–kept me from paying a visit to Temple and seeing my father for several weeks, during which time Janet loyally accustomed the squire to hear of the German princess, and she did it with a decent and agreeable cheerfulness that I quite approved of. I should have been enraged at a martyr-like appearance on her part, for I demanded a sprightly devotion to my interests, considering love so holy a thing, that where it existed, all surrounding persons were bound to do it homage and service. We were thrown together a great deal in attending on poor old Sewis, who would lie on his pillows recounting for hours my father’s midnight summons of the inhabitants of Riversley, and his little Harry’s infant expedition into the world. Temple and Heriot came to stay at the Grange, and assisted in some rough scene-painting–torrid colours representing the island of Jamaica. We hung it at the foot of old Sewis’s bed. He awoke and contemplated it, and went downstairs the same day, cured, he declared: the fact being that the unfortunate picture testified too strongly to the reversal of all he was used to in life, in having those he served to wait on him. The squire celebrated his recovery by giving a servants’ ball. Sewis danced with the handsomest lass, swung her to supper, and delivered an extraordinary speech, entirely concerning me, and rather to my discomposure, particularly so when it was my fate to hear that the old man had made me the heir of his savings. Such was his announcement, in a very excited voice, but incidentally upon a solemn adjuration to the squire to beware of his temper–govern his temper and not be a turncoat.
We were present at the head of the supper-table to hear our healths drunk. Sewis spoke like a half-caste oblivious of his training, and of the subjects he was at liberty to touch on as well. Evidently there was a weight of foreboding on his mind. He knew his master well. The squire excused him under the ejaculation, ‘Drunk, by the Lord!’ Sewis went so far as to mention my father ‘He no disgrace, sar, he no disgrace, I say! but he pull one way, old house pull other way, and ‘tween ’em my little Harry torn apieces, squire. He set out in the night “You not enter it any more!” Very well. I go my lawyer next day. You see my Will, squire. Years ago, and little Harry so high. Old Sewis not the man to change. He no turncoat, squire. God bless you, my master; you recollect, and ladies tell you if you forget, old Sewis no turncoat. You hate turncoat. You taught old Sewis, and God bless you, and Mr. Harry, and British Constitution, all Amen!’
With that he bounded to bed. He was dead next morning.
The squire was humorous over my legacy. It amounted to about seventeen hundred pounds invested in Government Stock, and he asked me what I meant to do with it; proposed a Charity to be established on behalf of decayed half-castes, insisting that servants’ money could never be appropriated to the uses of gentlemen. All the while he was muttering, ‘Turncoat! eh? turncoat?’–proof that the word had struck where it was aimed. For me, after thinking on it, I had a superstitious respect for the legacy, so I determined, in spite of the squire’s laughter over ‘Sixty pounds per annum!’ to let it rest in my name: I saw for the first time the possibility that I might not have my grandfather’s wealth to depend upon. He warned me of growing miserly. With my father in London, living freely on my property, I had not much fear of that. However, I said discreetly, ‘I don’t mind spending when I see my way.’
‘Oh! see your way,’ said he. ‘Better a niggard than a chuckfist. Only, there ‘s my girl: she ‘s good at accounts. One ‘ll do for them, Harry?– ha’n’t been long enough at home yet?’
Few were the occasions when our conversation did not diverge to this sort of interrogation. Temple and Heriot, with whom I took counsel, advised me to wait until the idea of the princess had worn its way into his understanding, and leave the work to Janet. ‘Though,’ said Heriot to me aside, ‘upon my soul, it’s slaughter.’ He believed that Janet felt keenly. But then, she admired him, and so they repaid one another.
I won my grandfather’s confidence in practical matters on a trip we took into Wales. But it was not enough for me to be a man of business, he affirmed; he wanted me to have some ambition; why not stand for our county at the next general election? He offered me his Welsh borough if I thought fit to decline a contest. This was to speak as mightily as a German prince. Virtually, in wealth and power, he was a prince; but of how queer a kind! He was immensely gratified by my refraining to look out for my father on our return journey through London, and remarked, that I had not seen him for some time, he supposed. To which I said, no, I had not, He advised me to let the fellow run his length. Suggesting that he held it likely I contributed to ‘the fellow’s’ support: he said generously, ‘Keep clear of him, Hal: I add you a thousand a year to your allowance,’ and damned me for being so thoughtful over it. I found myself shuddering at a breath of anger from him. Could he not with a word dash my hopes for ever? The warning I had taken from old Sewis transformed me to something like a hypocrite, and I dare say I gave the squire to understand, that I had not seen my father for a very long period and knew nothing of his recent doings.
‘Been infernally quiet these last two or three years,’ the squire muttered of the object of his aversion. ‘I heard of a City widow last, sick as a Dover packet-boat ’bout the fellow! Well, the women are ninnies, but you’re a man, Harry; you’re not to be taken in any longer, eh?’
I replied that I knew my father better now, and was asked how the deuce I knew him better; it was the world I knew better after my stay on the Continent.
I contained myself enough to say, ‘Very well, the world, sir.’
‘Flirted with one of their princesses?’ He winked.
‘On that subject I will talk to you some other time,’ said I.
‘Got to pay an indemnity? or what?’ He professed alarm, and pushed for explanations, with the air of a man of business ready to help me if need were. ‘Make a clean breast of it, Harry. You ‘re not the son of Tom Fool the Bastard for nothing, I’ll swear. All the same you’re Beltham; you’re my grandson and heir, and I’ll stand by you. Out with ‘t! She’s a princess, is she?’
The necessity for correcting his impressions taught me to think the moment favourable. I said, ‘I am engaged to her, sir.’
He returned promptly: ‘Then you’ll break it off.’
I shook my head.
‘Why, you can’t jilt my girl at home!’ said he.
‘Do you find a princess objectionable, sir?’
‘Objectionable? She’s a foreigner. I don’t know her. I never saw her. Here’s my Janet I’ve brought up for you, under my own eyes, out of the way of every damned soft-sawderer, safe and plump as a melon under a glass, and you fight shy of her, and go and engage yourself to a foreigner I don’t know and never saw! By George, Harry, I’ll call in a parson to settle you soon as ever we sight Riversley. I’ll couple you, by George, I will! ‘fore either of you know whether you’re on your legs or your backs.’
We were in the streets of London, so he was obliged to moderate his vehemence.
‘Have you consulted Janet?’ said I.
‘Consulted her? ever since she was a chick with half a feather on.’
‘A chick with half a feather on,’ I remarked, ‘is not always of the same mind as a piece of poultry of full plumage.’
‘Hang your sneering and your talk of a fine girl, like my Janet, as a piece of poultry, you young rooster! You toss your head up like a cock too conceited to crow. I ‘ll swear the girl ‘s in love with you. She does you the honour to be fond of you. She ‘s one in a million. A handsome girl, straight-backed, honest, just a dash, and not too much, of our blood in her.’
‘Consult her again, sir,’ I broke in. ‘You will discover she is not of your way of thinking.’
‘Do you mean to say she’s given you a left-hander, Harry?’
‘I have only to say that I have not given her the option.’
He groaned going up the steps of his hotel, faced me once or twice, and almost gained my sympathy by observing, ‘When we’re boys, the old ones worry us; when we’re old ones, the boys begin to tug!’ He rarely spoke so humanely,–rarely, at least, to me.
For a wonder, he let the matter drop: possibly because he found me temperate. I tried the system on him with good effect during our stay in London; that is, I took upon myself to be always cool, always courteous, deliberate in my replies, and not uncordial, though I was for representing the reserved young man. I obtained some praise for my style and bearing among his acquaintances. To one lady passing an encomium on me, he said, ‘Oh, some foreign princess has been training him,’ which seemed to me of good augury.
My friends Temple and Heriot were among the Riversley guests at Christmas. We rode over to John Thresher’s, of whom we heard that the pretty Mabel Sweetwinter had disappeared, and understood that suspicion had fallen upon one of us gentlemen. Bob, her brother, had gone the way of the bravest English fellows of his class-to America. We called on the miller, a soured old man. Bob’s evasion affected him more than Mabel’s, Martha Thresher said, in derision of our sex. I was pained to hear from her that Bob supposed me the misleader of his sister; and that he had, as she believed, left England, to avoid the misery of ever meeting me again, because he liked me so much. She had been seen walking down the lanes with some one resembling me in figure. Heriot took the miller’s view, counting the loss of one stout young Englishman to his country of far greater importance than the escapades of dozens of girls, for which simple creatures he had no compassion: he held the expression of it a sham. He had grown coxcombical. Without talking of his conquests, he talked largely of the ladies who were possibly in the situation of victims to his grace of person, though he did not do so with any unctuous boasting. On the contrary, there was a rather taking undertone of regret that his enfeebled over-fat country would give her military son no worthier occupation. He laughed at the mention of Julia Bulsted’s name. ‘She proves, Richie, marriage is the best of all receipts for women, just as it’s the worst for men. Poor Billy Bulsted, for instance, a first- rate seaman, and his heart’s only half in his profession since he and Julia swore their oath; and no wonder,–he made something his own that won’t go under lock and key. No military or naval man ought ever to marry.’
‘Stop,’ said Temple, ‘is the poor old country—— How about continuing the race of heroes?’
Heriot commended him to rectories, vicarages, and curates’ lodgings for breeding grounds, and coming round to Julia related one of the racy dialogues of her married life. ‘The saltwater widow’s delicious. Billy rushes home from his ship in a hurry. What’s this Greg writes me?–That he ‘s got a friend of his to drink with him, d’ ye mean, William?– A friend of yours, ma’am.–And will you say a friend of mine is not a friend of yours, William?–Julia, you’re driving me mad!–And is that far from crazy, where you said I drove you at first sight of me, William? Back to his ship goes Billy with a song of love and constancy.’
I said nothing of my chagrin at the behaviour of the pair who had furnished my first idea of the romantic beauty of love.
‘Why does she talk twice as Irish as she used to, Heriot?’
‘Just to coax the world to let her be as nonsensical as she likes. She’s awfully dull; she has only her nonsense to amuse her. I repeat: soldiers and sailors oughtn’t to marry. I’m her best friend. I am, on my honour: for I ‘m going to make Billy give up the service, since he can’t give her up. There she is!’ he cried out, and waved his hat to a lady on horseback some way down the slope of a road leading to the view of our heathland:
‘There’s the only girl living fit to marry a man and swear she ‘ll stick to him through life and death.’
He started at a gallop. Temple would have gone too at any possible speed, for he knew as well as I did that Janet was the girl alone capable of winning a respectful word from Heriot; but I detained him to talk of Ottilia and my dismal prospect of persuading the squire to consent to my proposal for her, and to dower her in a manner worthy a princess. He doled out his yes and no to me vacantly. Janet and Heriot came at a walking pace to meet us, he questioning her, she replying, but a little differently from her usual habit of turning her full face to the speaker. He was evidently startled, and, to judge from his posture, repeated his question, as one would say, ‘You did this?’ She nodded, and then uttered some rapid words, glanced at him, laughed shyly, and sank her features into repose as we drew near. She had a deep blush on her face. I thought it might be, that Janet and her loud champion had come to particular terms, a supposition that touched me with regrets for Temple’s sake. But Heriot was not looking pleased. It happened that whatever Janet uttered struck a chord of opposition in me. She liked the Winter and the Winter sunsets, had hopes of a frost for skating, liked our climate, thought our way of keeping Christmas venerable, rejoiced in dispensing the squire’s bounties–called them bounties, joined Heriot in abusing foreign countries to the exaltation of her own: all this with ‘Well, Harry, I’m sorry you don’t think as we do. And we do, don’t we?’ she addressed him.
‘I reserve a point,’ he said, and not playfully.
She appeared distressed, and courted a change of expression in his features, and I have to confess that never having seen her gaze upon any one save myself in that fashion, which was with her very winning, especially where some of her contralto tones of remonstrance or entreaty aided it, I felt as a man does at a neighbour’s shadow cast over his rights of property.
Heriot dropped to the rear: I was glad to leave her with Temple, and glad to see them canter ahead together on the sand of tie heaths.
‘She has done it,’ Heriot burst out abruptly. ‘She has done it!’ he said again. ‘Upon my soul, I never wished in my life before that I was a marrying man: I might have a chance of ending worth something. She has won the squire round with a thundering fib, and you’re to have the German if you can get her. Don’t be in a hurry. The squire ‘ll speak to you to-night: but think over it. Will you? Think what a girl this is. I believe on my honour no man ever had such an offer of a true woman. Come, don’t think it’s Heriot speaking–I’ve always liked her, of course. But I have always respected her, and that’s not of course. Depend upon it, a woman who can be a friend of men is the right sort of woman to make a match with. Do you suppose she couldn’t have a dozen fellows round her at the lift of her finger? the pick of the land! I’d trust her with an army. I tell you, Janet Ilchester ‘s the only girl alive who’ll double the man she marries. I don’t know another who wouldn’t make the name of wife laugh the poor devil out of house and company. She’s firm as a rock; and sweet as a flower on it! Will that touch you? Bah! Richie, let’s talk like men. I feel for her because she’s fond of you, and I know what it is when a girl like that sets her heart on a fellow. There,’ he concluded, ‘I ‘d ask you to go down on your knees and pray before you decide against her!’
Heriot succeeded in raising a certain dull indistinct image in my mind of a well-meaning girl, to whom I was bound to feel thankful, and felt so. I thanked Heriot, too, for his friendly intentions. He had never seen the Princess Ottilia. And at night I thanked my grandfather. He bore himself, on the whole, like the good and kindly old gentleman Janet loved to consider him. He would not stand in my light, he said, recurring to that sheet-anchor of a tolerant sentence whenever his forehead began to gather clouds. He regretted that Janet was no better than her sex in her preference for rakes, and wished me to the deuce for bringing Heriot into the house, and not knowing when I was lucky. ‘German grandchildren, eh!’ he muttered. No Beltham had ever married a foreigner. What was the time fixed between us for the marriage? He wanted to see his line safe before he died. ‘How do I know this foreign woman’ll bear?’ he asked, expecting an answer. His hand was on the back of a chair, grasping and rocking it; his eyes bent stormily on the carpet; they were set blinking rapidly after a glance at me. Altogether his self-command was creditable to Janet’s tuition.
Janet met me next day, saying with some insolence (so it struck me from her liveliness): ‘Well, it’s all right, Harry? Now you’ll be happy, I hope. I did not shine in my reply. Her amiable part appeared to be to let me see how brilliant and gracious the commonplace could be made to look. She kept Heriot at the Grange, against the squire’s remonstrance and her mother’s. ‘It ‘s to keep him out of harm’s way: the women he knows are not of the best kind for him,’ she said, with astounding fatuity. He submitted, and seemed to like it. She must be teaching Temple to skate figures in the frost, with a great display of good- humoured patience, and her voice at musical pitches. But her principal affectation was to talk on matters of business with Mr. Burgin and Mr. Trewint, the squire’s lawyer and bailiff, on mines and interest, on money and economical questions; not shrinking from politics either, until the squire cries out to the males assisting in the performance, ‘Gad, she ‘s a head as good as our half-dozen put together,’ and they servilely joined their fragmentary capitals in agreement. She went so far as to retain Peterborough to teach her Latin. He was idling in the expectation of a living in the squire’s gift.
The annoyance for me was that I could not detach myself from a contemplation of these various scenes, by reverting to my life in Germany. The preposterous closing of my interview with Ottilia blocked the way, and I was unable to write to her–unable to address her even in imagination, without pangs of shame at the review of the petty conspiracy I had sanctioned to entrap her to plight her hand to me, and without perpetually multiplying excuses for my conduct. So to escape them I was reduced to study Janet, forming one of her satellites. She could say to me impudently, with all the air of a friendly comrade, ‘Had your letter from Germany yet, Harry?’ She flew–she was always on the chase. I saw her permit Heriot to kiss her hand, and then the squire appeared, and Heriot and she burst into laughter, and the squire, with a puzzled face, would have the game explained to him, but understood not a bit of it, only growled at me; upon which Janet became serious and chid him. I was told by my aunt Dorothy to admire this behaviour of hers. One day she certainly did me a service: a paragraph in one of the newspapers spoke of my father, not flatteringly: ‘Richmond is in the field again,’ it commenced. The squire was waiting for her to hand the paper to him. None of us could comprehend why she played him off and denied him his right to the first perusal of the news; she was voluble, almost witty, full of sprightly Roxalana petulance.
‘This paper,’ she said, ‘deserves to be burnt,’ and she was allowed to burn it–money article, mining column as well–on the pretext of an infamous anti-Tory leader, of which she herself composed the first sentence to shock the squire completely. I had sight of that paper some time afterwards. Richmond was in the field again, it stated, with mock flourishes. But that was not the worst. My grandfather’s name was down there, and mine, and Princess Ottilia’s. My father’s connection with the court of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld was alluded to as the latest, and next to his winning the heiress of Riversley, the most successful of his ventures, inasmuch as his son, if rumour was to be trusted, had obtained the promise of the hand of the princess. The paragraph was an excerpt from a gossiping weekly journal, perhaps less malevolent than I thought it. There was some fun to be got out of a man who, the journal in question was informed, had joined the arms of England and a petty German principality stamped on his plate and furniture.
My gratitude to Janet was fervent enough when I saw what she had saved me from. I pressed her hand and held it. I talked stupidly, but I made my cruel position intelligible to her, and she had the delicacy, on this occasion, to keep her sentiments regarding my father unuttered. We sat hardly less than an hour side by side–I know not how long hand in hand. The end was an extraordinary trembling in the limb abandoned to me. It seized her frame. I would have detained her, but it was plain she suffered both in her heart and her pride. Her voice was under fair command-more than mine was. She counselled me to go to London, at once. ‘I would be off to London if I were you, Harry,’–for the purpose of checking my father’s extravagances,–would have been the further wording, which she spared me; and I thanked her, wishing, at the same time, that she would get the habit of using choicer phrases whenever there might, by chance, be a stress of emotion between us. Her trembling, and her ‘I’d be off,’ came into unpleasant collision in the recollection.
I acknowledge to myself that she was a true and hearty friend. She listened with interest to my discourse on the necessity of my being in Parliament before I could venture to propose formally for the hand of the princess, and undertook to bear the burden of all consequent negotiations with my grandfather. If she would but have allowed me to speak of Temple, instead of saying, ‘Don’t, Harry, I like him so much!’ at the very mention of his name, I should have sincerely felt my indebtedness to her, and some admiration of her fine spirit and figure besides. I could not even agree with my aunt Dorothy that Janet was handsome. When I had to grant her a pardon I appreciated her better.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
MY BANKERS’ BOOK
The squire again did honour to Janet’s eulogy and good management of him.
‘And where,’ said she, ‘would you find a Radical to behave so generously, Harry, when it touches him so?’
He accorded me his permission to select my side in politics, merely insisting that I was never to change it, and this he requested me to swear to, for (he called the ghost of old Sewis to witness) he abhorred a turncoat.
‘If you’re to be a Whig, or a sneaking half-and-half, I can’t help you much,’ he remarked. ‘I can pop a young Tory in for my borough, maybe; but I can’t insult a number of independent Englishmen by asking them to vote for the opposite crew; that’s reasonable, eh? And I can’t promise you plumpers for the county neither. You can date your Address from Riversley. You’ll have your house in town. Tell me this princess of yours is ready with her hand, and,’ he threw in roughly, ‘is a respectable young woman, I’ll commence building. You’ll have a house fit for a prince in town and country, both.’
Temple had produced an effect on him by informing him that ‘this princess of mine’ was entitled to be considered a fit and proper person, in rank and blood, for an alliance with the proudest royal Houses of Europe, and my grandfather was not quite destitute of consolation in the prospect I presented to him. He was a curious study to me, of the Tory mind, in its attachment to solidity, fixity, certainty, its unmatched generosity within a limit, its devotion to the family, and its family eye for the country. An immediate introduction to Ottilia would have won him to enjoy the idea of his grandson’s marriage; but not having seen her, he could not realize her dignity, nor even the womanliness of a ‘foreign woman.’
‘Thank God for one thing,’ he said: ‘we shan’t have that fellow bothering–shan’t have the other half of your family messing the business. You’ll have to account for him to your wife as you best can. I ‘ve nothing to do with him, mind that. He came to my house, stole my daughter, crazed her wits, dragged us all . . .’
The excuse to turn away from the hearing of abuse of my father was too good to be neglected, though it was horribly humiliating that I should have to take advantage of it–vexatious that I should seem chargeable with tacit lying in allowing the squire to suppose the man he hated to be a stranger to the princess. Not feeling sure whether it might be common prudence to delude him even passively, I thought of asking Janet for her opinion, but refrained. A stout deceiver has his merits, but a feeble hypocrite applying to friends to fortify him in his shifts and tergiversations must provoke contempt. I desired that Janet might continue to think well of me. I was beginning to drop in my own esteem, which was the mirror of my conception of Ottilia’s view of her lover.
Now, had I consulted Janet, I believe the course of my history would have been different, for she would not then, I may imagine, have been guilty of her fatal slip of the tongue that threw us into heavy seas when we thought ourselves floating on canal waters. A canal barge (an image to me of the most perfect attainable peace), suddenly, on its passage through our long fir-woods, with their scented reeds and flowing rushes, wild balsam and silky cotton-grass beds, sluiced out to sea and storm, would be somewhat in my likeness soon after a single luckless observation had passed at our Riversley breakfast-table one Sunday morning.
My aunt Dorothy and Mr. Peterborough were conversing upon the varieties of Christian sects, and particularly such as approached nearest to Anglicanism, together with the strange, saddening fact that the Christian religion appeared to be more divided than, Peterborough regretted to say, the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha, Mahomet, and other impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us, that we did not discard the reason of man we admitted man’s finite reason to our school of faith, and it was found refractory. Hence our many divisions.
‘The Roman Catholics admit reason?’ said Janet, who had too strong a turn for showing her keenness in little encounters with Peterborough.
‘No,’ said he; ‘the Protestants.’ And, anxious to elude her, he pressed on to enchain my aunt Dorothy’s attention. Janet plagued him meanwhile; and I helped her. We ran him and his schoolboy, the finite refractory, up and down, until Peterborough was glad to abandon him, and Janet said, ‘Did you preach to the Germans much?’ He had officiated in Prince Ernest’s private chapel: not, he added in his egregious modesty, not that he personally wished to officiate.
‘It was Harry’s wish?’ Janet said, smiling.
‘My post of tutor,’ Peterborough hastened to explain, ‘was almost entirely supernumerary. The circumstances being so, I the more readily acquiesced in the title of private chaplain, prepared to fulfil such duties as devolved upon me in that capacity, and acting thereon I proffered my occasional services. Lutheranism and Anglicanism are not, doubtless you are aware, divided on the broader bases. We are common Protestants. The Papacy, I can assure you, finds as little favour with one as with the other. Yes, I held forth, as you would say, from time to time. My assumption of the title of private chaplain, it was thought, improved the family dignity–that is, on our side.’
‘Thought by Harry?’ said Janet; and my aunt Dorothy said, ‘You and Harry had a consultation about it?’
‘Wanted to appear as grand as they could,’ quoth the squire.
Peterborough signified an assent, designed to modify the implication. ‘Not beyond due bounds, I trust, sir.’
‘Oh! now I understand,’ Janet broke out in the falsetto notes of a puzzle solved in the mind. ‘It was his father! Harry proclaiming his private chaplain!’
‘Mr. Harry’s father did first suggest–‘ said Peterborough, but her quickly-altered features caused him to draw in his breath, as she had done after one short laugh.
My grandfather turned a round side-eye on me, hard as a cock’s.
Janet immediately started topics to fill Peterborough’s mouth: the weather, the walk to church, the probable preacher. ‘And, grandada,’ said she to the squire, who was muttering ominously with a grim under- jaw, ‘His private chaplain!’ and for this once would not hear her, ‘Grandada, I shall drive you over to see papa this afternoon.’ She talked as if nothing had gone wrong. Peterborough, criminal red, attacked a jam-pot for a diversion. ‘Such sweets are rare indeed on the Continent,’ he observed to my aunt Dorothy. ‘Our homemade dainties are matchless.’
‘Private chaplain!’ the squire growled again.
‘It’s you that preach this afternoon,’ Janet said to Peterborough. ‘Do you give us an extempore sermon?’
‘You remind me, Miss Ilchester, I must look to it; I have a little trimming to do.’
Peterborough thought he might escape, but the squire arrested him. ‘You’ll give me five minutes before you’re out of the house, please. D’ ye smoke on Sundays?’
‘Not on Sundays, sir,’ said Peterborough, openly and cordially, as to signify that they were of one mind regarding the perniciousness of Sunday smoking.
‘See you don’t set fire to my ricks with your foreign chaplain’s tricks. I spied you puffing behind one t’ other day. There,’ the squire dispersed Peterborough’s unnecessary air of abstruse recollection, ‘don’t look as though you were trying to hit on a pin’s head in a bushel of oats. Don’t set my ricks on fire–that ‘s all.’
‘Mr. Peterborough,’ my aunt Dorothy interposed her voice to soften this rough treatment of him with the offer of some hot-house flowers for his sitting-room.
‘ Oh, I thank you!’ I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to the squire’s mercy.
Janet followed me out. ‘It was my fault, Harry. You won’t blame him, I know. But will he fib? I don’t think he’s capable of it, and I’m sure he can’t run and double. Grandada will have him fast before a minute is over.’
I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire’s promise that Peterborough should have his living,–so much it seemed possible to save.
She flew back, and in Peterborough’s momentary absence, did her work. Nothing could save the unhappy gentleman from a distracting scene and much archaic English. The squire’s power of vituperation was notorious: he could be more than a match for roadside navvies and predatory tramps in cogency of epithet. Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing that he had never heard such language,–never dreamed of it. And to find himself the object of it!–and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously defend himself! The pain to him was in the conscience,–which is, like the spleen, a function whose uses are only to be understood in its derangement. He had eased his conscience to every question right out, and he rejoiced to me at the immense relief it gave him. Conscientiously, he could not deny that he knew the squire’s objection to my being in my father’s society; and he had connived at it ‘for reasons, my dearest Harry, I can justify to God and man, but not–I had to confess as much– not, I grieve to say, to your grandfather. I attempted to do justice to the amiable qualities of the absent. In a moment I was assailed with epithets that . . . and not a word is to be got in when he is so violent. One has to make up one’s mind to act Andromeda, and let him be the sea-monster, as somebody has said; I forget the exact origin of the remark.’
The squire certainly had a whole ocean at command. I strung myself to pass through the same performance. To my astonishment I went unchallenged. Janet vehemently asserted that she had mollified the angry old man, who, however, was dark of visage, though his tongue kept silence. He was gruff over his wine-glass the blandishments of his favourite did not brighten him. From his point of view he had been treated vilely, and he was apparently inclined to nurse his rancour and keep my fortunes trembling in the balance. Under these circumstances it was impossible for me to despatch a letter to Ottilia, though I found that I could write one now, and I sat in my room writing all day,–most eloquent stuff it was. The shadow of misfortune restored the sense of my heroical situation, which my father had extinguished, and this unlocked the powers of speech. I wrote so admirably that my wretchedness could enjoy the fine millinery I decorated it in. Then to tear the noble composition to pieces was a bitter gratification. Ottilia’s station repelled and attracted me mysteriously. I could not separate her from it, nor keep my love of her from the contentions into which it threw me. In vain I raved, ‘What is rank?’ There was a magnet in it that could at least set me quivering and twisting, behaving like a man spellbound, as madly as any hero of the ballads under a wizard’s charm.
At last the squire relieved us. He fixed that side-cast cock’s eye of his on me, and said, ‘Where ‘s your bankers’ book, sir?’
I presumed that it was with my bankers, but did not suggest the possibility that my father might have it in his custody; for he had a cheque-book of his own, and regulated our accounts. Why not? I thought, and flushed somewhat defiantly. The money was mine.
‘Any objection to my seeing that book?’ said the squire.
‘None whatever, sir.’
He nodded. I made it a point of honour to write for the book to be sent down to me immediately.
The book arrived, and the squire handed it to me to break the cover, insisting, ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather not have me look at it?’
‘Quite,’ I replied. The question of money was to me perfectly unimportant. I did not see a glimpse of danger in his perusing the list of my expenses.
”Cause I give you my word I know nothing about it now,’ he said.
I complimented him on his frank method of dealing, and told him to look at the book if he pleased, but with prudence sufficiently awake to check the declaration that I had not once looked at it myself.
He opened it. We had just assembled in the hall, where breakfast was laid during Winter, before a huge wood fire. Janet had her teeth on her lower lip, watching the old man’s face. I did not condescend to be curious; but when I turned my head to him he was puffing through thin lips, and then his mouth crumpled in a knob. He had seen sights.
‘By George, I must have breakfast ‘fore I go into this!’ he exclaimed, and stared as if he had come out of an oven.
Dorothy Beltham reminded him that Prayers had not been read.
‘Prayers!’ He was about to objurgate, but affirmatived her motion to ring the bell for the servants, and addressed Peterborough: ‘You read ’em abroad every morning?’
Peterborough’s conscience started off on its inevitable jog-trot at a touch of the whip. ‘A-yes; that is–oh, it was my office.’ He had to recollect with exactitude:
‘I should specify exceptions; there were intervals . . .’
‘Please, open your Bible,’ the squire cut him short; ‘I don’t want a damned fine edge on everything.’
Partly for an admonition to him, or in pure nervousness, Peterborough blew his nose monstrously: an unlucky note; nothing went well after it. ‘A slight cold,’ he murmured and resumed the note, and threw himself maniacally into it. The unexpected figure of Captain Bulsted on tiptoe, wearing the ceremonial depressed air of intruders on these occasions, distracted our attention for a moment.
‘Fresh from ship, William?’ the squire called out.
The captain ejaculated a big word, to judge of it from the aperture, but it was mute as his footing on the carpet, and he sat and gazed devoutly toward Peterborough, who had waited to see him take his seat, and must now, in his hurry to perform his duty, sweep the peccant little redbound book to the floor. ‘Here, I’ll have that,’ said the squire. ‘Allow me, sir,’ said Peterborough; and they sprang into a collision.
‘Would you jump out of your pulpit to pick up an old woman’s umbrella?’ the squire asked him in wrath, and muttered of requiring none of his clerical legerdemain with books of business. Tears were in Peterborough’s eyes. My aunt Dorothy’s eyes dwelt kindly on him to encourage him, but the man’s irritable nose was again his enemy.
Captain Bulsted chanced to say in the musical voice of inquiry: ‘ Prayers are not yet over, are they?’
‘No, nor never will be with a parson blowing his horn at this rate,’ the squire rejoined. ‘And mind you,’ he said to Peterborough, after dismissing the servants, to whom my aunt Dorothy read the morning lessons apart, ‘I’d not have had this happen, sir, for money in lumps. I’ve always known I should hang the day when my house wasn’t blessed in the morning by prayer. So did my father, and his before him. Fiddle! sir, you can’t expect young people to wear decent faces when the parson’s hopping over the floor like a flea, and trumpeting as if the organ-pipe wouldn’t have the sermon at any price. You tried to juggle me out of this book here.’
‘On my!–indeed, sir, no!’ Peterborough proclaimed his innocence, and it was unlikely that the squire should have suspected him.
Captain Bulsted had come to us for his wife, whom he had not found at home on his arrival last midnight.
‘God bless my soul,’ said the squire, ‘you don’t mean to tell me she’s gone off, William?’
‘Oh! dear, no, sir,’ said the captain, ‘she’s only cruising.’
The squire recommended a draught of old ale. The captain accepted it. His comportment was cheerful in a sober fashion, notwithstanding the transparent perturbation of his spirit. He answered my aunt Dorothy’s questions relating to Julia simply and manfully, as became a gallant seaman, cordially excusing his wife for not having been at home to welcome him, with the singular plea, based on his knowledge of the sex, that the nearer she knew him to be the less able was she to sit on her chair waiting like Patience. He drank his ale from the hands of Sillabin, our impassive new butler, who had succeeded Sewis, the squire told him, like a Whig Ministry the Tory; proof that things were not improving.
‘I thought, sir, things were getting better,’ said the captain.
‘The damnedest mistake ever made, William. How about the Fall of Man, then? eh? You talk like a heathen Radical. It’s Scripture says we’re going from better to worse, and that’s Tory doctrine. And stick to the good as long as you can! Why, William, you were a jolly bachelor once.’
‘Sir, and ma’am,’ the captain bowed to Dorothy Beltham, ‘I have, thanks to you, never known happiness but in marriage, and all I want is my wife.’
The squire fretted for Janet to depart. ‘I ‘m going, grandada,’ she said. ‘You’ll oblige me by not attending to any matter of business to-day. Give me that book of Harry’s to keep for you.’
‘How d’ ye mean, my dear?’
‘It ‘s bad work done on a Sunday, you know.’
‘So it is. I’ll lock up the book.’
‘I have your word for that, grandada,’ said Janet.
The ladies retired, taking Peterborough with them.
‘Good-bye to the frocks! and now, William, out with your troubles,’ said the squire.
The captain’s eyes were turned to the door my aunt Dorothy had passed through.
‘You remember the old custom, sir!’
‘Ay, do I, William. Sorry for you then; infernally sorry for you now, that I am! But you’ve run your head into the halter.’
‘I love her, sir; I love her to distraction. Let any man on earth say she’s not an angel, I flatten him dead as his lie. By the way, sir, I am bound in duty to inform you I am speaking of my wife.’
‘To be sure you are, William, and a trim schooner-yacht she is.’
‘She ‘s off, sir; she’s off!’
I thought it time to throw in a word. ‘Captain Bulsted, I should hold any man but you accountable to me for hinting such things of my friend.’
‘Harry, your hand,’ he cried, sparkling.
‘Hum; his hand!’ growled the squire. ‘His hand’s been pretty lively on the Continent, William. Here, look at this book, William, and the bundle o’ cheques! No, I promised my girl. We’ll go into it to-morrow, he and I, early. The fellow has shot away thousands and thousands–been gallivanting among his foreign duchesses and countesses. There ‘s a petticoat in that bank-book of his; and more than one, I wager. Now he’s for marrying a foreign princess–got himself in a tangle there, it seems.’
‘Mightily well done, Harry!’ Captain Bulsted struck a terrific encomium on my shoulder, groaning, ‘May she be true to you, my lad!’
The squire asked him if he was going to church that morning.
‘I go to my post, sir, by my fireside,’ the captain replied; nor could he be induced to leave his post vacant by the squire’s promise to him of a sermon that would pickle his temper for a whole week’s wear and tear. He regretted extremely that he could not enjoy so excellent a trial of his patience, but he felt himself bound to go to his post and wait.
I walked over to Bulsted with him, and heard on the way that it was Heriot who had called for her and driven her off. ‘The man had been, I supposed,’ Captain Bulsted said, ‘deputed by some of you to fetch her over to Riversley. My servants mentioned his name. I thought it adviseable not to trouble the ladies with it to-day.’ He meditated. ‘I hoped I should find her at the Grange in the morning, Harry. I slept on it, rather than startle the poor lamb in the night.’
I offered him to accompany him at once to Heriot’s quarters.
‘What! and let my wife know I doubted her fidelity. My girl shall never accuse me of that.’
As it turned out, Julia had been taken by Heriot on a visit to Lady Maria Higginson, the wife of the intrusive millionaire, who particularly desired to know her more intimately. Thoughtless Julia, accepting the impudent invitation without scruple, had allowed herself to be driven away without stating the place of her destination. She and Heriot were in the Higginsons’ pew at church. Hearing from Janet of her husband’s arrival, she rushed home, and there, instead of having to beg forgiveness, was summoned to grant pardon. Captain Bulsted had drawn largely on Squire Gregory’s cellar to assist him in keeping his post.
The pair appeared before us fondling ineffably next day, neither one of them capable of seeing that our domestic peace at the Grange was unseated. ‘We ‘re the two wretchedest creatures alive; haven’t any of ye to spare a bit of sympathy for us?’ Julia began. ‘We ‘re like on a pitchfork. There’s William’s duty to his country, and there ‘s his affection for me, and they won’t go together, because Government, which is that horrid Admiralty, fears pitching and tossing for post-captains’ wives. And William away, I ‘m distracted, and the Admiralty’s hair’s on end if he stops. And, ‘deed, Miss Beltham, I’m not more than married to just half a husband.’
The captain echoed her, ‘Half! but happy enough for twenty whole ones, if you’ll be satisfied, my duck.’
Julia piteously entreated me, for my future wife’s sake, not to take service under Government. As for the Admiralty, she said, it had no characteristic but the abominable one, that it hated a woman. The squire laid two or three moderately coarse traps for the voluble frank creature, which she evaded with surprising neatness, showing herself more awake than one would have imagined her. Janet and I fancied she must have come with the intention to act uxorious husband and Irish wife for the distinct purpose of diverting the squire’s wrath from me, for he greatly delighted in the sight of merry wedded pairs. But they were as simple as possible in their display of happiness.
It chanced that they came opportunely. My bankers’ book had been the theme all the morning, and an astonishing one to me equally with my grandfather: Since our arrival in England, my father had drawn nine thousand pounds. The sums expended during our absence on the Continent reached the perplexing figures of forty-eight thousand. I knew it too likely, besides, that all debts were not paid. Self–self–self drew for thousands at a time; sometimes, as the squire’s convulsive forefinger indicated, for many thousands within a week. It was incomprehensible to him until I, driven at bay by questions and insults, and perceiving that concealment could not long be practised, made a virtue of the situation by telling him (what he in fact must have seen) that my father possessed a cheque-book as well as I, and likewise drew upon the account. We had required the money; it was mine, and I had sold out Bank Stock and Consols,–which gave very poor interest, I remarked cursorily-and had kept the money at my bankers’, to draw upon according to our necessities. I pitied the old man while speaking. His face was livid; language died from his lips. He asked to have little things explained to him–the two cheque-books, for instance,–and what I thought of doing when this money was all gone: for he supposed I did not expect the same amount to hand every two years; unless, he added, I had given him no more than a couple of years’ lease of life when I started for my tour. ‘Then the money’s gone!’ he summed up; and this was the signal for redemanding explanations. Had he not treated me fairly and frankly in handing over my own to me on the day of my majority? Yes.
‘And like a fool, you think–eh?’
‘I have no such thought in my head, sir.’
‘You have been keeping that fellow in his profligacy, and you ‘re keeping him now. Why, you ‘re all but a beggar! . . . Comes to my house, talks of his birth, carries off my daughter, makes her mad, lets her child grow up to lay hold of her money, and then grips him fast and pecks him, fleeces him! . . . You ‘re beggared–d ‘ye know that? He’s had the two years of you, and sucked you dry. What were you about? What were you doing? Did you have your head on? You shared cheque-books? good! . . . The devil in hell never found such a fool as you! You had your house full of your foreign bonyrobers–eh? Out with it! How did you pass your time? Drunk and dancing?’
By such degrees my grandfather worked himself up to the pitch for his style of eloquence. I have given a faint specimen of it. When I took the liberty to consider that I had heard enough, he followed me out of the library into the hall, where Janet stood. In her presence, he charged the princess and her family with being a pack of greedy adventurers, conspirators with ‘that fellow’ to plunder me; and for a proof of it, he quoted my words, that my father’s time had been spent in superintending the opening of a coal-mine on Prince Ernest’s estate. ‘That fellow pretending to manage a coal-mine!’ Could not a girl see it was a shuffle to hoodwink a greenhorn? And now he remembered it was Colonel Goodwin and his daughter who had told him of having seen ‘the fellow’ engaged in playing Court-buffoon to a petty German prince, and performing his antics, cutting capers like a clown at a fair.
‘Shame!’ said Janet.
‘Hear her!’ The squire turned to me.
But she cried: ‘Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don’t, be silent. If Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another. Don’t rob me of my love for you: I haven’t much besides that.’
‘No, because of a scoundrel and his young idiot!’
Janet frowned in earnest, and said: ‘I don’t permit you to change the meaning of the words I speak.’
He muttered a proverb of the stables. Reduced to behave temperately, he began the whole history of my bankers’ book anew–the same queries, the same explosions and imprecations.
‘Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,’ said Janet.
I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity; and the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous independence in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax. ‘You won’t go out and walk with her? You shall go down on your knees to her and beg her to give you her arm for a walk. By God! you shall, now, here, on the spot, or off you go to your German princess, with your butler’s legacy, and nothing more from me but good-bye and the door bolted. Now, down with you!’
He expected me to descend.
‘And if he did, he would never have my arm.’ Janet’s eyes glittered hard on the squire.
‘Before that rascal dies, my dear, he shall whine like a beggar out in the cold for the tips of your fingers!’
‘Not if he asks me first,’ said Janet.
This set him off again. He realized her prospective generosity, and contrasted it with my actual obtuseness. Janet changed her tactics. She assumed indifference. But she wanted experience, and a Heriot to help her in playing a part. She did it badly–overdid it; so that the old man, now imagining both of us to be against his scheme for uniting us, counted my iniquity as twofold. Her phrase, ‘Harry and I will always be friends,’ roused the loudest of his denunciations upon me, as though there never had been question of the princess, so inveterate was his mind’s grasp of its original designs. Friends! Would our being friends give him heirs by law to his estate and name? And so forth. My aunt Dorothy came to moderate his invectives. In her room the heavily- burdened little book of figures was produced, and the items read aloud; and her task was to hear them without astonishment, but with a business- like desire to comprehend them accurately, a method that softened the squire’s outbursts by degrees. She threw out hasty running commentaries: ‘Yes, that was for a yacht’; and ‘They were living at the Court of a prince’; such and such a sum was ‘large, but Harry knew his grandfather did not wish him to make a poor appearance.’
‘Why, do you mean to swear to me, on your oath, Dorothy Beltham,’ said the squire, amazed at the small amazement he created ‘you think these two fellows have been spending within the right margin? What’ll be women’s ideas next!’
‘No,’ she answered demurely. ‘I think Harry has been extravagant, and has had his lesson. And surely it is better now than later? But you are, not making allowances for his situation as the betrothed of a princess.’
‘That ‘s what turns your head,’ said he; and she allowed him to have the notion, and sneer at herself and her sex.
‘How about this money drawn since he came home?’ the squire persisted.
My aunt Dorothy reddened. He struck his finger on the line marking the sum, repeating his demand; and at this moment Captain Bulsted and Julia arrived. The ladies manoeuvred so that the captain and the squire were left alone together. Some time afterward the captain sent out word that he begged his wife’s permission to stay to dinner at the Grange, and requested me to favour him by conducting his wife to Bulsted: proof, as Julia said, that the two were engaged in a pretty hot tussle. She was sure her William would not be the one to be beaten.
I led her away, rather depressed by the automaton performance assigned to me; from which condition I awoke with a touch of horror to find myself paying her very warm compliments; for she had been coquettish and charming to cheer me, and her voice was sweet. We reached a point in our conversation I know not where, but I must have spoken with some warmth. ‘Then guess,’ said she, ‘what William is suffering for your sake now, Harry’; that is, ‘suffering in remaining away from me on your account’; and thus, in an instant, with a skill so intuitive as to be almost unconscious, she twirled me round to a right sense of my position, and set me reflecting, whether a love that clad me in such imperfect armour as to leave me penetrable to these feminine graces–a plump figure, swinging skirts, dewy dark eyelids, laughing red lips–could indeed be absolute love. And if it was not love of the immortal kind, what was I? I looked back on the thought like the ship on its furrow through the waters, and saw every mortal perplexity, and death under. My love of Ottilia delusion? Then life was delusion! I contemplated Julia in alarm, somewhat in the light fair witches were looked on when the faggots were piled for them. The sense of her unholy attractions abased and mortified me: and it set me thinking on the strangeness of my disregard of Mdlle. Jenny Chassediane when in Germany, who was far sprightlier, if not prettier, and, as I remembered, had done me the favour to make discreet play with her eyelids in our encounters, and long eyes in passing. I caught myself regretting my coldness of that period; for which regrets I could have swung the scourge upon my miserable flesh. Ottilia’s features seemed dying out of my mind. ‘Poor darling Harry!’ Julia sighed. ‘And d’ ye know, the sight of a young man far gone in love gives me the trembles?’ I rallied her concerning the ladder scene in my old schooldays, and the tender things she had uttered to Heriot. She answered, ‘Oh, I think I got them out of poets and chapters about lovemaking, or I felt it very much. And that’s what I miss in William; he can’t talk soft nice nonsense. I believe him, he would if he could, but he ‘s like a lion of the desert–it ‘s a roar!’
I rejoiced when we heard the roar. Captain Bulsted returned to take command of his ship, not sooner than I wanted him, and told us of a fierce tussle with the squire. He had stuck to him all day, and up to 11 P.M. ‘By George! Harry, he had to make humble excuses to dodge out of eyeshot a minute. Conquered him over the fourth bottle! And now all’s right. He’ll see your dad. “In a barn?” says the squire. “Here ‘s to your better health, sir,” I bowed to him; “gentlemen don’t meet in barns; none but mice and traps make appointments there.” To shorten my story, my lad, I have arranged for the squire and your excellent progenitor to meet at Bulsted: we may end by bringing them over a bottle of old Greg’s best. “See the boy’s father,” I kept on insisting. The point is, that this confounded book must be off your shoulders, my lad. A dirty dog may wash in a duck-pond. You see, Harry, the dear old squire may set up your account twenty times over, but he has a right to know how you twirl the coin. He says you don’t supply the information. I suggest to him that your father can, and will. So we get them into a room together. I’ll be answerable for the rest. And now top your boom, and to bed here: off in the morning and tug the big vessel into port here! And, Harry, three cheers, and another bottle to crown the victory, if you ‘re the man for it?’
Julia interposed a decided negative to the proposal; an ordinarily unlucky thing to do with bibulous husbands, and the captain looked uncomfortably checked; but when he seemed to be collecting to assert himself, the humour of her remark, ‘Now, no bravado, William,’ disarmed him.
‘Bravado, my sweet chuck?’
‘Won’t another bottle be like flashing your sword after you’ve won the day?’ said she.
He slung his arm round her, and sent a tremendous whisper into my ear– ‘A perfect angel!’
I started for London next day, more troubled aesthetically regarding the effect produced on me by this order of perfect angels than practically anxious about material affairs, though it is true that when I came into proximity with my father, the thought of his all but purely mechanical power of making money spin, fly, and vanish, like sparks from a fire- engine, awakened a serious disposition in me to bring our monetary partnership to some definite settlement. He was living in splendour, next door but one to the grand establishment he had driven me to from Dipwell in the old days, with Mrs. Waddy for his housekeeper once more, Alphonse for his cook. Not living on the same scale, however, the troubled woman said. She signified that it was now the whirlwind. I could not help smiling to see how proud she was of him, nevertheless, as a god-like charioteer–in pace, at least.
‘Opera to-night,’ she answered my inquiries for him, admonishing me by her tone that I ought not to be behindhand in knowing his regal rules and habits. Praising his generosity, she informed me that he had spent one hundred pounds, and offered a reward of five times the sum, for the discovery of Mabel Sweetwinter. ‘Your papa never does things by halves, Mr. Harry!’ Soon after she was whimpering, ‘Oh, will it last?’ I was shown into the room called ‘The princess’s room,’ a miracle of furniture, not likely to be occupied by her, I thought, the very magnificence of the apartment striking down hope in my heart like cold on a nerve. Your papa says the whole house is to be for you, Mr. Harry, when the happy day comes.’ Could it possibly be that he had talked of the princess? I took a hasty meal and fortified myself with claret to have matters clear with him before the night was over.
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