The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete

Thus I grew in his favour, till I heard from him that I was to be the heir of Riversley and his estates, but on one condition, which he did not then mention. If I might have spoken to him of my father, I should have loved him. As it was, I liked old Sewis better, for he would talk to me of the night when my father carried me away, and though he never uttered the flattering words I longed to hear, he repeated the story often, and made the red hall glow with beams of my father’s image. My walks and rides were divided between the road he must have followed toward London, bearing me in his arms, and the vacant place of Kiomi’s camp. Kiomi stood for freedom, pointing into the darkness I wished to penetrate that I might find him. If I spoke of him to my aunt she trembled. She said, ‘Yes, Harry, tell me all you are thinking about, whatever you want to know’; but her excessive trembling checked me, and I kept my feelings to myself—a boy with a puzzle in his head and hunger in his heart. At times I rode out to the utmost limit of the hour giving me the proper number of minutes to race back and dress for dinner at the squire’s table, and a great wrestling I had with myself to turn my little horse’s head from hills and valleys lying East; they seemed to have the secret of my father. Blank enough they looked if ever I despaired of their knowing more than I. My Winter and Summer were the moods of my mind constantly shifting. I would have a week of the belief that he was near Riversley, calling for me; a week of the fear that he was dead; long dreams of him, as travelling through foreign countries, patting the foreheads of boys and girls on his way; or driving radiantly, and people bowing. Radiantly, I say: had there been touches of colour in these visions, I should have been lured off in pursuit of him. The dreams passed colourlessly; I put colouring touches to the figures seen in them afterward, when I was cooler, and could say, ‘What is the use of fancying things?’ yet knew that fancying things was a consolation. By such means I came to paint the mystery surrounding my father in tender colours. I built up a fretted cathedral from what I imagined of him, and could pass entirely away out of the world by entering the doors.

Want of boys’ society as well as hard head-work produced this mischief. My lessons were intermittent Resident tutors arrived to instruct me, one after another. They were clergymen, and they soon proposed to marry my aunt Dorothy, or they rebuked the squire for swearing. The devil was in the parsons, he said: in his time they were modest creatures and stuck to the bottle and heaven. My aunt was of the opinion of our neighbours, who sent their boys to school and thought I should be sent likewise.

‘No, no,’ said the squire; ‘my life’s short when the gout’s marching up to my middle, and I’ll see as much of my heir as I can. Why, the lad’s my daughter’s son: He shall grow up among his tenantry. We’ll beat the country and start a man at last to drive his yard of learning into him without rolling sheep’s eyes right and left.’

Unfortunately the squire’s description of man was not started. My aunt was handsome, an heiress (that is, she had money of her own coming from her mother’s side of the family), and the tenderest woman alive, with a voice sweeter than flutes. There was a saying in the county that to marry a Beltham you must po’chay her.

A great-aunt of mine, the squire’s sister, had been carried off. She died childless. A favourite young cousin of his likewise had run away with a poor baronet, Sir Roderick Ilchester, whose son Charles was now and then our playmate, and was a scapegrace. But for me he would have been selected by the squire for his heir, he said; and he often ‘confounded’ me to my face on that account as he shook my hand, breaking out: ‘I’d as lief fetch you a cuff o’ the head, Harry Richmond, upon my honour!’ and cursing at his luck for having to study for his living, and be what he called a sloppy curate now that I had come to Riversley for good.

He informed me that I should have to marry his sister Janet; for that they could not allow the money to go out of the family. Janet Ilchester was a quaint girl, a favourite of my aunt Dorothy, and the squire’s especial pet; red-cheeked, with a good upright figure in walking and riding, and willing to be friendly, but we always quarrelled: she detested hearing of Kiomi.

‘Don’t talk of creatures you met when you were a beggar, Harry Richmond,’ she said.

‘I never was a beggar,’ I replied.

‘Then she was a beggar,’ said Janet; and I could not deny it; though the only difference I saw between Janet and Kiomi was, that Janet continually begged favours and gifts of people she knew, and Kiomi of people who were strangers.

My allowance of pocket-money from the squire was fifty pounds a year. I might have spent it all in satisfying Janet’s wishes for riding-whips, knives, pencil-cases, cairngorm buttons, and dogs. A large part of the money went that way. She was always getting notice of fine dogs for sale. I bought a mastiff for her, a brown retriever, and a little terrier. She was permitted to keep the terrier at home, but I had to take care of the mastiff and retriever. When Janet came to look at them she called them by their names; of course they followed me in preference to her; she cried with jealousy. We had a downright quarrel. Lady Ilchester invited me to spend a day at her house, Charley being home for his Midsummer holidays. Charley, Janet, and I fished the river for trout, and Janet, to flatter me (of which I was quite aware), while I dressed her rod as if she was likely to catch something, talked of Heriot, and then said:

‘Oh! dear, we are good friends, aren’t we? Charley says we shall marry one another some day, but mama’s such a proud woman she won’t much like your having such a father as you ‘ve got unless he ‘s dead by that time and I needn’t go up to him to be kissed.’

I stared at the girl in wonderment, but not too angrily, for I guessed that she was merely repeating her brother’s candid speculations upon the future. I said: ‘Now mind what I tell you, Janet: I forgive you this once, for you are an ignorant little girl and know no better. Speak respectfully of my father or you never see me again.’

Here Charley sang out: ‘Hulloa! you don’t mean to say you’re talking of your father.’

Janet whimpered that I had called her an ignorant little girl. If she had been silent I should have pardoned her. The meanness of the girl in turning on me when the glaring offence was hers, struck me as contemptible beyond words. Charley and I met half way. He advised me not to talk to his sister of my father. They all knew, he said, that it was no fault of mine, and for his part, had he a rascal for a father, he should pension him and cut him; to tell the truth, no objection against me existed in his family except on the score of the sort of father I owned to, and I had better make up my mind to shake him off before I grew a man; he spoke as a friend. I might frown at him and clench my fists, but he did speak as a friend.

Janet all the while was nibbling a biscuit, glancing over it at me with mouse-eyes. Her short frock and her greediness, contrasting with the talk of my marrying her, filled me with renewed scorn, though my heart was sick at the mention of my father. I asked her what she knew of him. She nibbled her biscuit, mumbling, ‘He went to Riversley, pretending he was a singing-master. I know that’s true, and more.’

‘Oh, and a drawing-master, and a professor of legerdemain,’ added her brother. ‘Expunge him, old fellow; he’s no good.’

‘No, I’m sure he’s no good,’ said Janet.

I took her hand, and told her, ‘You don’t know how you hurt me; but you’re a child: you don’t know anything about the world. I love my father, remember that, and what you want me to do is mean and disgraceful; but you don’t know better. I would forfeit everything in the world for him. And when you’re of age to marry, marry anybody you like—you won’t marry me. And good-bye, Janet. Think of learning your lessons, and not of marrying. I can’t help laughing.’ So I said, but without the laughter. Her brother tried hard to get me to notice him.

Janet betook herself to the squire. Her prattle of our marriage in days to come was excuseable. It was the squire’s notion. He used to remark generally that he liked to see things look safe and fast, and he had, as my aunt confided to me, arranged with Lady Ilchester, in the girl’s hearing, that we should make a match. My grandfather pledged his word to Janet that he would restore us to an amicable footing. He thought it a light task. Invitations were sent out to a large party at Riversley, and Janet came with all my gifts on her dress or in her pockets. The squire led the company to the gates of his stables; the gates opened, and a beautiful pony, with a side-saddle on, was trotted forth, amid cries of admiration. Then the squire put the bridle-reins in my hands, bidding me present it myself. I asked the name of the person. He pointed at Janet. I presented the pony to Janet, and said, ‘It’s from the squire.’

She forgot, in her delight, our being at variance.

‘No, no, you stupid Harry, I’m to thank you. He’s a darling pony. I want to kiss you.’

I retired promptly, but the squire had heard her.

‘Back, sir!’ he shouted, swearing by this and that. ‘You slink from a kiss, and you’re Beltham blood?

Back to her, lad. Take it. Up with her in your arms or down on your knees. Take it manfully, somehow. See there, she ‘s got it ready for you.’

‘I’ve got a letter ready for you, Harry, to say—oh! so sorry for offending you,’ Janet whispered, when I reached the pony’s head; ‘and if you’d rather not be kissed before people, then by-and-by, but do shake hands.’

‘Pull the pony’s mane,’ said I; ‘that will do as well. Observe—I pull, and now you pull.’

Janet mechanically followed my actions. She grimaced, and whimpered, ‘I could pull the pony’s mane right out.’

‘Don’t treat animals like your dolls,’ said I.

She ran to the squire, and refused the pony. The squire’s face changed from merry to black.

‘Young man,’ he addressed me, ‘don’t show that worse half of yours in genteel society, or, by the Lord! you won’t carry Beltham buttons for long. This young lady, mind you, is a lady by birth both sides.’

‘She thinks she is marriageable,’ said I; and walked away, leaving loud laughter behind me.

But laughter did not console me for the public aspersion of him I loved. I walked off the grounds, and thought to myself it was quite time I should be moving. Wherever I stayed for any length of time I was certain to hear abuse of my father. Why not wander over the country with Kiomi, go to sea, mount the Andes, enlist in a Prussian regiment, and hear the soldiers tell tales of Frederick the Great? I walked over Kiomi’s heath till dark, when one of our grooms on horseback overtook me, saying that the squire begged me to jump on the horse and ride home as quick as possible. Two other lads and the coachman were out scouring the country to find me, and the squire was anxious, it appeared. I rode home like a wounded man made to feel proud by victory, but with no one to stop the bleeding of his wounds: and the more my pride rose, the more I suffered pain. There at home sat my grandfather, dejected, telling me that the loss of me a second time would kill him, begging me to overlook his roughness, calling me his little Harry and his heir, his brave-spirited boy; yet I was too sure that a word of my father to him would have brought him very near another ejaculation concerning Beltham buttons.

‘You’re a fiery young fellow, I suspect,’ he said, when he had recovered his natural temper. ‘I like you for it; pluck’s Beltham. Have a will of your own. Sweat out the bad blood. Here, drink my health, Harry. You’re three parts Beltham, at least, and it’ll go hard if you’re not all Beltham before I die. Old blood always wins that race, I swear. We ‘re the oldest in the county.

Damn the mixing. My father never let any of his daughters marry, if he could help it, nor’ll I, bar rascals.

Here’s to you, young Squire Beltham. Harry Lepel Beltham—does that suit ye? Anon, anon, as they say in the play. Take my name, and drop the Richmond no, drop the subject: we’ll talk of it by-and-by.’

So he wrestled to express his hatred of my father without offending me; and I studied him coldly, thinking that the sight of my father in beggar’s clothes, raising a hand for me to follow his steps, would draw me forth, though Riversley should beseech me to remain clad in wealth.

CHAPTER IX. AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED

A dream that my father lay like a wax figure in a bed gave me thoughts of dying. I was ill and did not know it, and imagined that my despair at the foot of the stairs of ever reaching my room to lie down peacefully was the sign of death. My aunt Dorothy nursed me for a week: none but she and my dogs entered the room. I had only two faint wishes left in me: one that the squire should be kept out of my sight, the other that she would speak to me of my mother’s love for my father. She happened to say, musing, ‘Harry, you have your mother’s heart.’

I said, ‘No, my father’s.’

From that we opened a conversation, the sweetest I had ever had away from him, though she spoke shyly and told me very little. It was enough for me in the narrow world of my dogs’ faces, and the red-leaved creeper at the window, the fir-trees on the distant heath, and her hand clasping mine. My father had many faults, she said, but he had been cruelly used, or deceived, and he bore a grievous burden; and then she said, ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes,’ and ‘Yes,’ in the voice one supposes of a ghost retiring, to my questions of his merits. I was refreshed and satisfied, like the parched earth with dews when it gets no rain, and I was soon well.

When I walked among the household again, I found that my week of seclusion had endowed me with a singular gift; I found that I could see through everybody. Looking at the squire, I thought to myself, ‘My father has faults, but he has been cruelly used,’ and immediately I forgave the old man; his antipathy to my father seemed a craze, and to account for it I lay in wait for his numerous illogical acts and words, and smiled visibly in contemplation of his rough unreasonable nature, and of my magnanimity. He caught the smile, and interpreted it.

‘Grinning at me, Harry; have I made a slip in my grammar, eh?’

Who could feel any further sensitiveness at his fits of irritation, reading him as I did? I saw through my aunt: she was always in dread of a renewal of our conversation. I could see her ideas flutter like birds to escape me. And I penetrated the others who came in my way just as unerringly. Farmer Eckerthy would acknowledge, astonished, his mind was running on cricket when I taxed him with it.

‘Crops was the cart-load of my thoughts, Master Harry, but there was a bit o’ cricket in it, too, ne’er a doubt.’

My aunt’s maid, Davis, was shocked by my discernment of the fact that she was in love, and it was useless for her to pretend the contrary, for I had seen her granting tender liberties to Lady Ilchester’s footman.

Old Sewis said gravely, ‘You’ve been to the witches, Master Harry’; and others were sure ‘I had got it from the gipsies off the common.’

The maids were partly incredulous, but I perceived that they disbelieved as readily as they believed. With my latest tutor, the Rev. Simon Hart, I was not sufficiently familiar to offer him proofs of my extraordinary power; so I begged favours of him, and laid hot-house flowers on his table in the name of my aunt, and had the gratification of seeing him blush. His approval of my Latin exercise was verbal, and weak praise in comparison; besides I cared nothing for praises not referring to my grand natural accomplishment. ‘And my father now is thinking of me!’ That was easy to imagine, but the certainty of it confirmed me in my conceit.

‘How can you tell?—how is it possible for you to know people’s thoughts?’ said Janet Ilchester, whose head was as open to me as a hat. She pretended to be rather more frightened of me than she was.

‘And now you think you are flattering me!’ I said.

She looked nervous.

‘And now you’re asking yourself what you can do better than I can!’

She said, ‘Go on.’

I stopped.

She charged me with being pulled up short.

I denied it.

‘Guess, guess!’ said she. ‘You can’t.’

My reply petrified her. ‘You were thinking that you are a lady by birth on both sides.’

At first she refused to admit it. ‘No, it wasn’t that, Harry, it wasn’t really. I was thinking how clever you are.’

‘Yes, after, not before.’

‘No, Harry, but you are clever. I wish I was half as clever. Fancy reading people’s ideas! I can read my pony’s, but that’s different; I know by his ears. And as for my being a lady, of course I am, and so are you—I mean, a gentleman. I was thinking—now this is really what I was thinking—I wished your father lived near, that we might all be friends. I can’t bear the squire when he talks.... And you quite as good as me, and better. Don’t shake me off, Harry.’

I shook her in the gentlest manner, not suspecting that she had read my feelings fully as well as I her thoughts. Janet and I fell to talking of my father incessantly, and were constantly together. The squire caught one of my smiles rising, when he applauded himself lustily for the original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful to me. It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife who would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be the preferable person. I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her brother Charley the subject we conversed on.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said she, and told him straightway.

Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire’s table: ‘So, Harry Richmond, you’re the cleverest fellow in the world, are you? There’s Janet telling everybody your father’s the cleverest next to you, and she’s never seen him!’

‘How? hulloa, what ‘s that?’ sang out the squire.

‘Charley was speaking of my father, sir,’ I said, preparing for thunder.

We all rose. The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were coming on.

‘Don’t sit at my table again,’ he said, after a terrible struggle to be articulate.

His hand was stretched at me. I swung round to depart. ‘No, no, not you; that fellow,’ he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.

I tried to intercede—the last who should have done it.

‘You like to hear him, eh?’ said the squire.

I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.

‘Biter’s bit. I’ve dished myself, that’s clear,’ said Charley; and he spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.

He and Janet were staying at Riversley. They left next morning, for the squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.

‘I ‘ll tell you what; there ‘s no doubt about one thing,’ said Charley; ‘Janet’s right—some of those girls are tremendously deep: you’re about the cleverest fellow I’ve ever met in my life. I thought of working into the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for me without much damaging you;—perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the squire spoke of making me his heir—or words to that effect neatly conjugated—before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on Riversley—I ‘d betray my bosom friend. I’m regularly “hoist on my own petard,” as they say in the newspapers. I’m a curate and no mistake. You did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat boxing. I bear no malice when I’m floored neatly.’

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father’s society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet. At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus Temple’s father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley. Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared, was working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero. I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon prove himself the better scholar. ‘There’s my old Richie!’ said Temple, fondling me on the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me at once.

We roamed the neighbourhood talking old school-days over, visiting houses, hunting and dancing, declaring every day we would write for Heriot to join us, instead of which we wrote a valentine to Julia Rippenger, and despatched a companion one composed in a very different spirit to her father. Lady Ilchester did us the favour to draw a sea-monster, an Andromeda, and a Perseus in the shape of a flying British hussar, for Julia’s valentine. It seemed to us so successful that we scattered half-a-dozen over the neighbourhood, and rode round it on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day to see the effect of them, meeting the postman on the road. He gave me two for myself. One was transparently from Janet, a provoking counterstroke of mine to her; but when I opened the other my heart began beating. The standard of Great Britain was painted in colours at the top; down each side, encricled in laurels, were kings and queens of England with their sceptres, and in the middle I read the initials, A. F-G. R. R., embedded in blue forget-me-hots. I could not doubt it was from my father. Riding out in the open air as I received it, I could fancy in my hot joy that it had dropped out of heaven.

‘He’s alive; I shall have him with me; I shall have him with me soon!’ I cried to Temple. ‘Oh! why can’t I answer him? where is he? what address? Let’s ride to London. Don’t you understand, Temple? This letter’s from my father. He knows I’m here. I’ll find him, never mind what happens.’

‘Yes, but,’ said Temple, ‘if he knows where you are, and you don’t know where he is, there’s no good in your going off adventuring. If a fellow wants to be hit, the best thing he can do is to stop still.’

Struck by the perspicacity of his views, I turned homeward. Temple had been previously warned by me to avoid speaking of my father at Riversley; but I was now in such a boiling state of happiness, believing that my father would certainly appear as he had done at Dipwell farm, brilliant and cheerful, to bear me away to new scenes and his own dear society, that I tossed the valentine to my aunt across the breakfast-table, laughing and telling her to guess the name of the sender. My aunt flushed.

‘Miss Bannerbridge?’ she said.

A stranger was present. The squire introduced us.

‘My grandson, Harry Richmond, Captain William Bulsted, frigate Polyphemus; Captain Bulsted, Master Augustus Temple.’

For the sake of conversation, Temple asked him if his ship was fully manned.

‘All but a mate,’ said the captain.

I knew him by reputation as the brother of Squire Gregory Bulsted of Bulsted, notorious for his attachment to my aunt, and laughing-stock of the county.