The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete

‘No,’ said I. ‘You have got away from me once. I shall keep you in sight and hearing, if I have to lie at your door for it. You will go with me to London to-morrow. I shall treat you as a man I have to guard, and I shall not let you loose before I am quite sure of you.’

‘Loose!’ he exclaimed, throwing up an arm and a leg.

‘I mean, sir, that you shall be in my presence wherever you are, and I will take care you don’t go far and wide. It’s useless to pretend astonishment. I don’t argue and I don’t beseech any further: I just sit on guard, as I would over a powder-cask.’

My father raised himself on an elbow. ‘The explosion,’ he said, examining his watch, ‘occurred at about five minutes to eleven—we are advancing into the morning—last night. I received on your behalf the congratulations of friends Loftus, Alton, Segrave, and the rest, at that hour. So, my dear Richie, you are sitting on guard over the empty magazine.’

I listened with a throbbing forehead, and controlled the choking in my throat, to ask him whether he had touched the newspapers.

‘Ay, dear lad, I have sprung my mine in them,’ he replied.

‘You have sent word—?’

‘I have despatched a paragraph to the effect, that the prince and princess have arrived to ratify the nuptial preliminaries.’

‘You expect it to appear this day?’

‘Or else my name and influence are curiously at variance with the confidence I repose in them, Richie.’

‘Then I leave you to yourself,’ I said. ‘Prince Ernest knows he has to expect this statement in the papers?’

‘We trumped him with that identical court-card, Richie.’

‘Very well. To-morrow, after we have been to my grandfather, you and I part company for good, sir. It costs me too much.’

‘Dear old Richie,’ he laughed, gently. ‘And now to bye-bye! My blessing on you now and always.’

He shut his eyes.

CHAPTER LI. AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER’S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT

The morning was sultry with the first rising of the sun. I knew that Ottilia and Janet would be out. For myself, I dared not leave the house. I sat in my room, harried by the most penetrating snore which can ever have afflicted wakeful ears. It proclaimed so deep-seated a peacefulness in the bosom of the disturber, and was so arrogant, so ludicrous, and inaccessible to remonstrance, that it sounded like a renewal of our midnight altercation on the sleeper’s part. Prolonged now and then beyond all bounds, it ended in the crashing blare whereof utter wakefulness cannot imagine honest sleep to be capable, but a playful melody twirled back to the regular note. He was fast asleep on the sitting-room sofa, while I walked fretting and panting. To this twinship I seemed condemned. In my heart nevertheless there was a reserve of wonderment at his apparent astuteness and resolution, and my old love for him whispered disbelief in his having disgraced me. Perhaps it was wilful self-deception. It helped me to meet him with a better face.

We both avoided the subject of our difference for some time: he would evidently have done so altogether, and used his best and sweetest manner to divert me: but when I struck on it, asking him if he had indeed told me the truth last night, his features clouded as though with an effort of patience. To my consternation, he suddenly broke away, with his arms up, puffing and stammering, stamping his feet. He would have a truce—he insisted on a truce, I understood him to exclaim, and that I was like a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master. He raved of the gallant down-rightedness of the young bloods of his day, and how splendidly this one and that had compassed their ends by winning great ladies, lawfully, or otherwise. For several minutes he was in a state of frenzy, appealing to his pattern youths of a bygone generation, as to moral principles—stuttering, and of a dark red hue from the neck to the temples. I refrained from a scuffle of tongues. Nor did he excuse himself after he had cooled. His hand touched instinctively for his pulse, and, with a glance at the ceiling, he exclaimed, ‘Good Lord!’ and brought me to his side. ‘These wigwam houses check my circulation,’ said he. ‘Let us go out-let us breakfast on board.’

The open air restored him, and he told me that he had been merely oppressed by the architect of the inferior classes, whose ceiling sat on his head. My nerves, he remarked to me, were very exciteable. ‘You should take your wine, Richie,—you require it. Your dear mother had a low-toned nervous system.’ I was silent, and followed him, at once a captive and a keeper.

This day of slackened sails and a bright sleeping water kept the yachtsmen on land; there was a crowd to meet the morning boat. Foremost among those who stepped out of it was the yellow-haired Eckart, little suspecting what the sight of him signalled to me. I could scarcely greet him at all, for in him I perceived that my father had fully committed himself to his plot, and left me nothing to hope. Eckart said something of Prince Hermann. As we were walking off the pier, I saw Janet conversing with Prince Ernest, and the next minute Hermann himself was one of the group. I turned to Eckart for an explanation.

‘Didn’t I tell you he called at your house in London and travelled down with me this morning!’ said Eckart.

My father looked in the direction of the princes, but his face was for the moment no index. They bowed to Janet, and began talking hurriedly in the triangle of road between her hotel, the pier, and the way to the villas: passing on, and coming to a full halt, like men who are not reserving their minds. My father stept out toward them. He was met by Prince Ernest. Hermann turned his back.

It being the hour of the appointment, I delivered Eckart over to Temple’s safe-keeping, and went up to Janet. ‘Don’t be late, Harry,’ she said.

I asked her if she knew the object of the meeting appointed by my grandfather.

She answered impatiently, ‘Do get him away from the prince.’ And then: ‘I ought to tell you the princess is well, and so on—pardon me just now: Grandada is kept waiting, and I don’t like it.’

Her actual dislike was to see Prince Ernest in dialogue with my father, it seemed to me; and the manner of both, which was, one would have said, intimate, anything but the manner of adversaries. Prince Ernest appeared to affect a pleasant humour; he twice, after shaking my father’s hand, stepped back to him, as if to renew some impression. Their attitude declared them to be on the best of terms. Janet withdrew her attentive eyes from observing them, and threw a world of meaning into her abstracted gaze at me. My father’s advance put her to flight.

Yet she gave him the welcome of a high-bred young woman when he entered the drawing-room of my grandfather’s hotel-suite. She was alone, and she obliged herself to accept conversation graciously. He recommended her to try the German Baths for the squire’s gout, and evidently amused her with his specific probations for English persons designing to travel in company, that they should previously live together in a house with a collection of undisciplined chambermaids, a musical footman, and a mad cook: to learn to accommodate their tempers. ‘I would add a touch of earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party know one another’s edges before starting.’ This was too far a shot of nonsense for Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or stupidity, or trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding. ‘I, for my part,’ said he, ‘stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies himself a born and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and no dog with a turn for feeling himself pulled by the collar. And that reminds me you are amateur of dogs. Have you a Pomeranian boar-hound?’

‘No,’ said Janet; ‘I have never even seen one’

‘That high.’ My father raised his hand flat.

‘Bigger than our Newfoundlands!’

‘Without exaggeration, big as a pony. You will permit me to send you one, warranted to have passed his distemper, which can rarely be done for our human species, though here and there I venture to guarantee my man as well as my dog.’

Janet interposed her thanks, declining to take the dog, but he dwelt on the dog’s charms, his youth, stature, appearance, fitness, and grandeur, earnestly. I had to relieve her apprehensions by questioning where the dog was.

‘In Germany,’ he said.

It was not improbable, nor less so that the dog was in Pomerania likewise.

The entry of my aunt Dorothy, followed by my grandfather, was silent.

‘Be seated,’ the old man addressed us in a body, to cut short particular salutations.

My father overshadowed him with drooping shoulders.

Janet wished to know whether she was to remain.

‘I like you by me always,’ he answered, bluff and sharp.

‘We have some shopping to do,’ my aunt Dorothy murmured, showing she was there against her will.

‘Do you shop out of London?’ said my father; and for some time he succeeded in making us sit for the delusive picture of a comfortable family meeting.

My grandfather sat quite still, Janet next to him. ‘When you’ve finished, Mr. Richmond,’ he remarked.

‘Mr. Beltham, I was telling Miss Beltham that I join in the abuse of London exactly because I love it. A paradox! she says. But we seem to be effecting a kind of insurance on the life of the things we love best by crying them down violently. You have observed it? Denounce them—they endure for ever! So I join any soul on earth in decrying our dear London. The naughty old City can bear it.’

There was a clearing of throats. My aunt Dorothy’s foot tapped the floor.

‘But I presume you have done me the honour to invite me to this conference on a point of business, Mr. Beltham?’ said my father, admonished by the hint.

‘I have, sir,’ the squire replied.

‘And I also have a point. And, in fact, it is urgent, and with your permission, Mr. Beltham, I will lead the way.’

‘No, sir, if you please.

I’m a short speaker, and go to it at once, and I won’t detain you a second after you’ve answered me.’

My father nodded to this, with the conciliatory comment that it was business-like.

The old man drew out his pocket-book.

‘You paid a debt,’ he said deliberately, ‘amounting to twenty-one thousand pounds to my grandson’s account.’

‘Oh! a debt! I did, sir. Between father and boy, dad and lad; debts! … but use your own terms, I pray you.’

‘I don’t ask you where that money is now. I ask you to tell me where you got it from.’

‘You speak bluntly, my dear sir.’

‘You won’t answer, then?’

‘You ask the question as a family matter? I reply with alacrity, to the best of my ability: and with my hand on my heart, Mr. Beltham, let me assure you, I very heartily desire the information to be furnished to me. Or rather—why should I conceal it? The sources are irregular, but a child could toddle its way to them—you take my indication. Say that I obtained it from my friends. My friends, Mr. Beltham, are of the kind requiring squeezing. Government, as my chum and good comrade, Jorian DeWitt, is fond of saying, is a sponge—a thing that when you dive deep enough to catch it gives liberal supplies, but will assuredly otherwise reverse the process by acting the part of an absorbent. I get what I get by force of arms, or I might have perished long since.’

‘Then you don’t know where you got it from, sir?’

‘Technically, you are correct, sir.’

‘A bird didn’t bring it, and you didn’t find it in the belly of a fish.’

‘Neither of these prodigies. They have occurred in books I am bound to believe; they did not happen to me.’

‘You swear to me you don’t know the man, woman, or committee, who gave you that sum?’

‘I do not know, Mr. Beltham. In an extraordinary history, extraordinary circumstances! I have experienced so many that I am surprised at nothing.’

‘You suppose you got it from some fool?’

‘Oh! if you choose to indict Government collectively?’

‘You pretend you got it from Government?’

‘I am termed a Pretender by some, Mr. Beltham. The facts are these: I promised to refund the money, and I fulfilled the promise. There you have the only answer I can make to you. Now to my own affair. I come to request you to demand the hand of the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld on behalf of my son Harry, your grandson; and I possess the assurance of the prince, her father, that it will be granted. Doubtless you, sir, are of as old a blood as the prince himself. You will acknowledge that the honour brought to the family by an hereditary princess is considerable: it is something. I am prepared to accompany you to his Highness, or not, as you please. It is but a question of dotation, and a selection from one or two monosyllables.’

Janet shook her dress.

The squire replied: ‘We ‘ll take that up presently. I haven’t quite done. Will you tell me what agent paid you the sum of money?’

‘The usual agent—a solicitor, Mr. Beltham; a gentleman whose business lay amongst the aristocracy; he is defunct; and a very worthy old gentleman he was, with a remarkable store of anecdotes of his patrons, very discreetly told: for you never heard a name from him.’

‘You took him for an agent of Government, did you? why?’

‘To condense a long story, sir, the kernel of the matter is, that almost from the hour I began to stir for the purpose of claiming my rights—which are transparent enough this old gentleman—certainly from no sinister motive, I may presume—commenced the payment of an annuity; not sufficient for my necessities, possibly, but warrant of an agreeable sort for encouraging my expectations; although oddly, this excellent old Mr. Bannerbridge invariably served up the dish in a sauce that did not agree with it, by advising me of the wish of the donator that I should abandon my Case. I consequently, in common with my friends, performed a little early lesson in arithmetic, and we came to the one conclusion open to reflective minds—namely, that I was feared.’

My aunt Dorothy looked up for the first time.

‘Janet and I have some purchases to make,’ she said.

The squire signified sharply that she must remain where she was.

‘I think aunty wants fresh air; she had a headache last night,’ said Janet.

I suggested that, as my presence did not seem to be required, I could take her on my arm for a walk to the pier-head.

Her face was burning; she would gladly have gone out, but the squire refused to permit it, and she nodded over her crossed hands, saying that she was in no hurry.

‘Ha! I am,’ quoth he.

‘Dear Miss Beltham!’ my father ejaculated solicitously. ‘Here, sir, oblige me by attending to me,’ cried the squire, fuming and blinking. ‘I sent for you on a piece of business. You got this money through a gentleman, a solicitor, named Bannerbridge, did you?’

‘His name was Bannerbridge, Mr. Beltham.’

‘Dorothy, you knew a Mr. Bannerbridge?’

She faltered: ‘I knew him.... Harry was lost in the streets of London when he was a little fellow, and the Mr. Bannerbridge I knew found him and took him to his house, and was very kind to him.’

‘What was his Christian name?’

I gave them: ‘Charles Adolphus.’

‘The identical person!’ exclaimed my father.

‘Oh! you admit it,’ said the squire. ‘Ever seen him since the time Harry was lost, Dorothy?’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I have heard he is dead:

‘Did you see him shortly before his death?’

‘I happened to see him a short time before!

‘He was your man of business, was he?’

‘For such little business as I had to do.’

‘You were sure you could trust him, eh?’

‘Yes.’

My aunt Dorothy breathed deeply.

‘By God, ma’am, you’re a truthful woman!’

The old man gave her a glare of admiration.

It was now my turn to undergo examination, and summoned by his apostrophe to meet his eyes, I could appreciate the hardness of the head I had to deal with.

‘Harry, I beg your pardon beforehand; I want to get at facts; I must ask you what you know about where the money came from?’

I spoke of my attempts to discover the whence and wherefore of it.

‘Government? eh?’ he sneered.

‘I really can’t judge whether it came from that quarter,’ said I.

‘What do you think?—think it likely?’

I thought it unlikely, and yet likelier than that it should have come from an individual.

‘Then you don’t suspect any particular person of having sent it in the nick of time, Harry Richmond?’

I replied: ‘No, sir; unless you force me to suspect you.’

He jumped in his chair, astounded and wrathful, confounded me for insinuating that he was a Bedlamite, and demanded the impudent reason of my suspecting him to have been guilty of the infernal folly.

I had but the reason to instance that he was rich and kind at heart.

‘Rich! kind!’ he bellowed. ‘Just excuse me—I must ask for the purpose of my inquiry;—there, tell me, how much do you believe you ‘ve got of that money remaining? None o’ that Peterborough style of counting in the back of your pate. Say!’

There was a dreadful silence.

My father leaned persuasively forward.

‘Mr. Beltham, I crave permission to take up the word. Allow me to remind you of the prize Harry has won. The prince awaits you to bestow on him the hand of his daughter—’

‘Out with it, Harry,’ shouted the squire.

‘Not to mention Harry’s seat in Parliament,’ my father resumed, ‘he has a princess to wife, indubitably one of the most enviable positions in the country! It is unnecessary to count on future honours; they may be alluded to. In truth, sir, we make him the first man in the country. Not necessarily Premier: you take my meaning: he possesses the combination of social influence and standing with political achievements, and rank and riches in addition—’

‘I ‘m speaking to my grandson, sir,’ the squire rejoined, shaking himself like a man rained on. ‘I ‘m waiting for a plain answer, and no lie. You’ve already confessed as much as that the money you told me on your honour you put out to interest; psh!—for my grandson was smoke. Now let’s hear him.’

My father called out: ‘I claim a hearing! The money you speak of was put out to the very highest interest. You have your grandson in Parliament, largely acquainted with the principal members of society, husband of an hereditary princess! You have only at this moment to propose for her hand. I guarantee it to you. With that money I have won him everything. Not that I would intimate to you that princesses are purchaseable. The point is, I knew how to employ it.’

‘In two months’ time, the money in the Funds in the boy’s name—you told me that.’

‘You had it in the Funds in Harry Richmond’s name, sir.’

‘Well, sir, I’m asking him whether it’s in the Funds now.’

‘Oh! Mr. Beltham.’

‘What answer’s that?’

The squire was really confused by my father’s interruption, and lost sight of me.

‘I ask where it came from: I ask whether it’s squandered?’ he continued.

‘Mr. Beltham, I reply that you have only to ask for it to have it; do so immediately.’

‘What ‘s he saying?’ cried the baffled old man.

‘I give you a thousand times the equivalent of the money, Mr. Beltham.’

‘Is the money there?’

‘The lady is here.’

‘I said money, sir.’

‘A priceless honour and treasure, I say emphatically.’ My grandfather’s brows and mouth were gathering for storm. Janet touched his knee.

‘Where the devil your understanding truckles, if you have any, I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘What the deuce—lady got to do with money!’

‘Oh!’ my father laughed lightly, ‘customarily the alliance is, they say, as close as matrimony. Pardon me. To speak with becoming seriousness, Mr. Beltham, it was duly imperative that our son should be known in society, should be, you will apprehend me, advanced in station, which I had to do through the ordinary political channel. There could not but be a considerable expenditure for such a purpose.’

‘In Balls, and dinners!’

‘In everything that builds a young gentleman’s repute.’

‘You swear to me you gave your Balls and dinners, and the lot, for Harry Richmond’s sake?’

‘On my veracity, I did, sir!’

‘Please don’t talk like a mountebank. I don’t want any of your roundabout words for truth; we’re not writing a Bible essay. I try my best to be civil.’

My father beamed on him.

‘I guarantee you succeed, sir. Nothing on earth can a man be so absolutely sure of as to succeed in civility, if he honestly tries at it. Jorian DeWitt,—by the way, you may not know him—an esteemed old friend of mine, says—that is, he said once—to a tolerably impudent fellow whom he had disconcerted with a capital retort, “You may try to be a gentleman, and blunder at it, but if you will only try to be his humble servant, we are certain to establish a common footing.” Jorian, let me tell you, is a wit worthy of our glorious old days.’

My grandfather eased his heart with a plunging breath.

‘Well, sir, I didn’t ask you here for your opinion or your friend’s, and I don’t care for modern wit.’

‘Nor I, Mr. Beltham, nor I! It has the reek of stable straw. We are of one mind on that subject. The thing slouches, it sprawls. It—to quote Jorian once more—is like a dirty, idle, little stupid boy who cannot learn his lesson and plays the fool with the alphabet. You smile, Miss Ilchester: you would appreciate Jorian. Modern wit is emphatically degenerate. It has no scintillation, neither thrust nor parry. I compare it to boxing, as opposed to the more beautiful science of fencing.’

‘Well, sir, I don’t want to hear your comparisons,’ growled the squire, much oppressed. ‘Stop a minute…’

‘Half a minute to me, sir,’ said my father, with a glowing reminiscence of Jorian DeWitt, which was almost too much for the combustible old man, even under Janet’s admonition.

My aunt Dorothy moved her head slightly toward my father, looking on the floor, and he at once drew in.

‘Mr. Beltham, I attend to you submissively.’

‘You do? Then tell me what brought this princess to England?’

‘The conviction that Harry had accomplished his oath to mount to an eminence in his country, and had made the step she is about to take less, I will say, precipitous: though I personally decline to admit a pointed inferiority.’

‘You wrote her a letter.’

‘That, containing the news of the attack on him and his desperate illness, was the finishing touch to the noble lady’s passion.’

‘Attack? I know nothing about an attack. You wrote her a letter and wrote her a lie. You said he was dying.’

‘I had the boy inanimate on my breast when I despatched the epistle.’

‘You said he had only a few days to live.’

‘So in my affliction I feared.’

‘Will you swear you didn’t write that letter with the intention of drawing her over here to have her in your power, so that you might threaten you’d blow on her reputation if she or her father held out against you and all didn’t go as you fished for it?’

My father raised his head proudly.

‘I divide your query into two parts. I wrote, sir, to bring her to his side. I did not write with any intention to threaten.’

‘You’ve done it, though.’

‘I have done this,’ said my father, toweringly: ‘I have used the power placed in my hands by Providence to overcome the hesitations of a gentleman whose illustrious rank predisposes him to sacrifice his daughter’s happiness to his pride of birth and station. Can any one confute me when I assert that the princess loves Harry Richmond?’

I walked abruptly to one of the windows, hearing a pitiable wrangling on the theme. My grandfather vowed she had grown wiser, my father protested that she was willing and anxious; Janet was appealed to. In a strangely-sounding underbreath, she said, ‘The princess does not wish it.’

‘You hear that, Mr. Richmond?’ cried the squire.

He returned: ‘Can Miss Ilchester say that the Princess Ottilia does not passionately love my son Harry Richmond? The circumstances warrant me in beseeching a direct answer.’

She uttered: ‘No.’

I looked at her; she at me.

‘You can conduct a case, Richmond,’ the squire remarked.

My father rose to his feet. ‘I can conduct my son to happiness and greatness, my dear sir; but to some extent I require your grandfatherly assistance; and I urge you now to present your respects to the prince and princess, and judge yourself of his Highness’s disposition for the match. I assure you in advance that he welcomes the proposal.’