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The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of a Father and Son

by George Meredith · English · Gutenberg #34858 · 1,016,071 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of a Father and Son

Author: George Meredith

Editor: Frank Wadleigh Chandler


        
Release date: January 5, 2011 [eBook #34858]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Dianne Nolan, Louise Setzer and
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL: A HISTORY OF A FATHER AND SON ***




Produced by David Edwards, Dianne Nolan, Louise Setzer and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)











  THE MODERN
  STUDENT'S LIBRARY

  EACH VOLUME EDITED BY A LEADING
  AMERICAN AUTHORITY

  This series is composed of such works as are conspicuous in the
  province of literature for their enduring influence. Every volume
  is recognized as essential to a liberal education and will tend to
  infuse a love for true literature and an appreciation of the
  qualities which cause it to endure.

  _A descriptive list of the volumes published in this series appears
  in the last pages of this volume_

  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS




  _THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY_

  THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL




    THE ORDEAL
    OF
    RICHARD FEVEREL

    A HISTORY OF A FATHER AND SON

    BY
    GEORGE MEREDITH

    EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
    BY

    FRANK W. CHANDLER

    PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND DEAN OF THE
    COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

    NEW YORK   CHICAGO   BOSTON   ATLANTA

    SAN FRANCISCO       DALLAS




    COPYRIGHT, 1896, 1917, BY
    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

    Printed in the United States of America

    _All rights reserved. No part of this book
    may be reproduced in any form without
    the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons_




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                            PAGE

       I.--THE INMATES OF RAYNHAM ABBEY                              1

      II.--SHOWING HOW THE FATES SELECTED THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY
              TO TRY THE STRENGTH OF THE SYSTEM                      9

     III.--THE MAGIAN CONFLICT                                      16

      IV.--ARSON                                                    21

       V.--ADRIAN PLIES HIS HOOK                                    30

      VI.--JUVENILE STRATAGEMS                                      35

     VII.--DAPHNE'S BOWER                                           42

    VIII.--THE BITTER CUP                                           47

      IX.--A FINE DISTINCTION                                       55

       X.--RICHARD PASSES THROUGH HIS PRELIMINARY ORDEAL, AND IS
              THE OCCASION OF AN APHORISM                           60

      XI.--IN WHICH THE LAST ACT OF THE BAKEWELL COMEDY IS CLOSED
              IN A LETTER                                           67

     XII.--THE BLOSSOMING SEASON                                    72

    XIII.--THE MAGNETIC AGE                                         83

     XIV.--AN ATTRACTION                                            92

      XV.--FERDINAND AND MIRANDA                                    97

     XVI.--UNMASKING OF MASTER RIPTON THOMPSON                     106

    XVII.--GOOD WINE AND GOOD BLOOD                                115

   XVIII.--THE SYSTEM ENCOUNTERS THE WILD OATS SPECIAL PLEA        120

     XIX.--A DIVERSION PLAYED ON A PENNY WHISTLE                   124

      XX.--CELEBRATES THE TIME-HONOURED TREATMENT OF A DRAGON
              BY THE HERO                                          127

     XXI.--RICHARD IS SUMMONED TO TOWN TO HEAR A SERMON            145

    XXII.--INDICATES THE APPROACHES OF FEVER                       153

   XXIII.--CRISIS IN THE APPLE-DISEASE                             163

    XXIV.--OF THE SPRING PRIMROSE AND THE AUTUMNAL                 175

     XXV.--IN WHICH THE HERO TAKES A STEP                          180

    XXVI.--RECORDS THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF THE HERO               199

   XXVII.--CONTAINS AN INTERCESSION FOR THE HEROINE                213

  XXVIII.--RELATES HOW PREPARATIONS FOR ACTION WERE CONDUCTED
              UNDER THE APRIL OF LOVERS                            216

    XXIX.--IN WHICH THE LAST ACT OF THE COMEDY TAKES THE PLACE
              OF THE FIRST                                         233

     XXX.--CELEBRATES THE BREAKFAST                                246

    XXXI.--THE PHILOSOPHER APPEARS IN PERSON                       255

   XXXII.--PROCESSION OF THE CAKE                                  262

  XXXIII.--NURSING THE DEVIL                                       279

   XXXIV.--CONQUEST OF AN EPICURE                                  290

    XXXV.--CLARE'S MARRIAGE                                        310

   XXXVI.--A DINNER-PARTY AT RICHMOND                              325

  XXXVII.--MRS. BERRY ON MATRIMONY                                 341

 XXXVIII.--AN ENCHANTRESS                                          352

   XXXIX.--THE LITTLE BIRD AND THE FALCON: A BERRY TO THE
              RESCUE!                                              376

      XL.--CLARE'S DIARY                                           392

     XLI.--AUSTIN RETURNS                                          409

    XLII.--NATURE SPEAKS                                           420

   XLIII.--AGAIN THE MAGIAN CONFLICT                               429

    XLIV.--THE LAST SCENE                                          437

     XLV.--LADY BLANDISH TO AUSTIN WENTWORTH                       454





INTRODUCTION


I

Among the Victorian novelists, George Meredith occupies a place apart.
Unlike Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, he appeals to a select few. Those
who appreciate him are folk of his own temper--cultivated, intellectual,
urbane. They are persons of taste and discernment. They are generally
the middle-aged rather than the young. They are those who, aloof and
contemplative, relish the comedy of life, rather than those who throw
themselves whole-heartedly into the game. It is not to be marvelled at,
therefore, that Meredith should have won his way slowly, or that
recognition, when it came, should have rendered his position unique
and secure.

Meredith's career as a writer of prose was opened, in 1856, with
_The Shaving of Shagpat_, an experiment in fantastic Oriental
romance. In the following year, he exploited German romance less
successfully in _Farina, a Legend of Cologne_. Having thus trained
his 'prentice hand, he passed to mastery of his craft in _The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel_, published in 1859. This was his first modern
novel, and probably his best. It showed him, not only expert in the
use of language and original in literary technic, but distinguished,
also, as an observer of the world and an analyst of character. The
psychological novel of George Eliot, just emerging, found here a
rival even more subtle. _Adam Bede_, a twin-birth with _Feverel_,
although detailed in its exploration of motive and feeling, demanded
less mental effort on the part of its readers; it accordingly
attracted much greater attention. Whereas it was often reprinted, no
second edition of _Feverel_ came from the press for nearly two
decades.

In the meantime, Meredith had continued his course undeterred by
lack of popular approval, writing six other novels before the
appearance, in 1879, of _The Egoist_--most characteristic of all.
Two novels in particular reflected his experience of Italy, gained
while acting there as war correspondent in 1866. The first was
_Emilia in England_ (1864), later rechristened _Sandra Belloni_. The
second was its sequel _Vittoria_ (1867). The other works of the
period comprise the semi-farcical _Evan Harrington_ (1861); the
serious _Rhoda Fleming_ (1865); the clever _Harry Richmond_
(1870-71); and Meredith's favorite--_Beauchamp's Career_ (1874-75).
It is _The Egoist_, however, that most completely illustrates its
author's conception of the novel of types. In this work, with rare
skill and comic _elan_, if with a persistency a little wearisome,
he lays bare the secrets of a heart and intellect thoroughly
self-centered, proceeding so obviously from the desire to make
out a case that he is likely to displease those who value story, yet
satisfying those who enjoy brilliant comment on character and a
study of its intricacies.

In his later novels, Meredith never forgot the typical in attending
to the particular, even though _The Tragic Comedians_ (1880)
reflected incidents in the life of the socialist leader Lassalle,
and _Diana of the Crossways_ (1885) certain traits of Sheridan's
granddaughter, Mrs. Norton. _One of Our Conquerors_ (1891), _Lord
Ormont and his Aminta_ (1894), and _The Amazing Marriage_ (1895)
bring to a close the catalogue of Meredith's fiction, except for the
unfinished _Celt and Saxon_ published after his death.

Of Meredith as a poet this is not the place to speak. Suffice it to
say that he did his first writing in verse, issuing a volume when
twenty-three, and several others later in life, the best known being
his sequence of irregular sonnets entitled _Modern Love_ (1867).
His poetry, like his prose, is rich in content but difficult at
times by reason of its crabbed and meticulous expression--a trait
due to no obscurity of thought or lack of feeling, but rather to the
desire to compress much meaning within a cryptic phrase. As a
playwright, Meredith attempted comedy in The _Sentimentalists_,
which was acted posthumously. As an essayist, he fathered a
memorable discussion of the comic spirit and its uses, made concrete
in his novels.

Meredith's life was comparatively uneventful. He was born in 1828 at
Portsmouth, the son of a naval outfitter. Early left an orphan, he
was educated in Germany, and, returning to England, studied law,
experimented in journalism, and fell in with a group of intellectuals
led by Frederic Harrison and John Morley. He became literary
adviser to the publishers Chapman and Hall; he edited for a
short period _The Fortnightly Review_, and served abroad as
correspondent for _The Morning Post_. But most of his maturity was
passed in rural retirement in Surrey. He was twice married, at first
unhappily to a daughter of the novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, and
then more fortunately to a Miss Vulliamy, who bore him two children.
His fame grew very slowly. Not until the age of sixty was he
recognized as among the chief English novelists. But at the time of
his death, in 1909, he was admittedly the foremost man of letters in
Great Britain.


II

Meredith is first and last an intellectualist. Hence his preference
for the psychological novel, for the novel of types, for the novel
that is half essay, for the novel of distinctive style. Hence, also,
his conception of the importance for the novelist of comedy and the
comic spirit. Comedy, according to Meredith, is embodied mind, and
its function is to expose violations of rational law. It is common
sense chastising with the laughter of reason aberrations from the
sensible. Comedy measures individual shortcomings by the social
norm. It results from "the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of
our united social intelligence." It is "a game played to throw
reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the
drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of
the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the
correctness of the representation convincing." Comedy is thus
refined rather than Rabelaisian; it is impartial rather than
sentimental. It relies upon creating ideal figures that epitomize
mankind in certain follies. It is typical and general in character,
whereas tragedy is concerned primarily with the individual.

"The comic spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of
characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of
them and their speech." On the stage, the great master of such
comedy is Moliere, and in the novel, we might add, Meredith.
Meredith's confession of faith in the efficacy of the comic spirit
is given in the prelude to _The Egoist_, and in these words of his
famous _Essay_: "If you believe that our civilization is founded in
common-sense, you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit
overhead.... It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun
lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips.... Its common aspect
is one of unsolicitous observation.... Men's future upon earth does
not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does;
and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown...; whenever they
offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined
with conceit,... the Spirit overhead will look humanly malign and
cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter. That is the Comic Spirit."

Unquestionably it is by the aid of this spirit that Meredith writes
his novels, even including such a tragedy from the victim's point of
view as _Richard Feverel_. For Meredith is theoretic or nothing.
Conceiving of a folly to be displayed and made ridiculous, he
invents persons and situations best to accomplish his purpose. He
is, therefore, no mere realist examining the confused detail of
actual life "by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of
the infinitesimal." He is rather an idealist, who holds it to be the
business of art to render life in quintessence. The artist must both
simplify and elaborate. First, he must simplify experience into
typical deeds and persons, eliminating from his scheme the merely
accidental and particular. Second, he must elaborate his
simplification, presenting it through representative concrete
instances that it may lose the aspect of an abstract formula and
acquire emotional significance. Meredith is thus an intellectualist
engaged in playing a game of literary chess. He has made the pattern
on his board and designed the pieces, and he moves them according to
a pre-arranged plan. Just as his Sir Austin seeks to enact the role
of Providence in determining the career of Richard Feverel, so
Meredith plays Providence to his personages, and, more than most
novelists, he visibly controls their fate.

Since Meredith's folk are etherealized specimens of humanity set and
kept in motion by their creator, it is his attitude toward them that
interests us quite as much as their actions. Meredith's attitude is
determined by his comic outlook upon life. Unswayed by the petty
prejudices of his people, he surveys them with Olympian serenity,
aware of a hundred impulses and errors in their conduct that will
lead to conclusions undreamt of by themselves but clearly foreseen
by the novelist and his readers. From a rarer atmosphere than that
in which his people move, Meredith looks down upon their whimsies
and their deeds with a smile of calm omniscience.

Moreover, he separates himself from them by a wall of clever
comment, sometimes sparkling and ironical, sometimes soberly
extended to the proportions of an essay. Indeed, his novels are
sometimes one-third narrative and two-thirds essay, with the
dissertational manner infecting the narrative parts incurably. No
one, I suppose, would continue reading _The Egoist_ merely from
interest in its plot. To enjoy it one must relish inspecting at
leisure the artificial attitudes of artificial people and listening,
not merely to their smart chatter, but to the smarter discourse of
the master of the puppets, who, while making them dance, lectures
for the edification of the elect. Thus Meredith, having shown his
hero touched by jealousy, lapses into a little essay on the theme.
"Remember the poets upon Jealousy," he writes. "It is to be haunted
in the heaven of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore
surrounded, embraced, hugged by this infernal Third; it is love's
bed of burning marl; to see and taste the withering Third in the
bosom of sweetness; to be dragged through the past and find the fair
Eden of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and
glory to behold them blood; to adore the bitter creature trebly and
with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe; it is to be
cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and supplicating, and
consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and victoriously
self-justified in revenge." Needless to say, generalizations of this
sort, intruding upon the narrative at every turn, choke its progress
and prove distracting.

Almost equally distracting is Meredith's predilection for resorting
to the methods of comedy while writing fiction. As W. C. Brownell
has put it; "The necessities of comedy, the irruption of new
characters, their disappearance after they have done their turn,
expectation balked by shifting situations, the frequent postponement
of the denouement when it particularly impends, and the alleviation
of impatience by a succession of subordinate climaxes--all the
machinery of the stage, in fact--impair the narrative."


III

But if the tricks of the essayist and the playwright are freely
borrowed by Meredith, sometimes to his disadvantage and to ours,
they are nevertheless in a measure appropriate to the kind of
fiction he affects. For Meredith is a psychological novelist. He is
bent upon displaying the inward process of the mind. As Richard Le
Galliene has said of him: "The passion of his genius is ... the
tracing of the elemental in the complex; the registration of the
infinitesimal vibrations of first causes, the tracking in human life
of the shadowiest trail of primal instinct, the hairbreadth
measurement of subtle psychological tangents: and the embodiment of
these results in artistic form." Meredith, in _Richard Feverel_,
declares that for the novel "An audience will come to whom it will
be given to see the elementary machinery at work.... To them nothing
will be trivial.... They will see the links of things as they pass,
and wonder not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter
came out of that small one." Certainly Meredith's efforts have
tended to realize that time. But the psychology of his characters is
general rather than individual. You are conscious that these minds
are typical, or even symbolic. They belong to an imaginary and
rational world treated as though it were real.

An incidental passage in _Beauchamp's Career_ shows that Meredith
has understood both his limitations and his peculiar ability. "My
way," he writes, "is like a Rhone island in the summer drought,
stony, unattractive, and difficult between the two forceful streams
of the unreal and the over-real which delight mankind--honour to the
conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none! they are actual yet
uncommon. It is the clockwork of the brain that they are directed to
set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant benches!--the
conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to;
and if you are there impervious to them we are lost."

In Meredith's novels, which indeed reveal in operation "the
clockwork of the brain," the author has taken care still further to
intellectualize his appeal by means of his style. His technic holds
attention; he is an artificer of style, and, as such, he writes a
style of artifice. He seeks to express himself with novelty and
distinction. If a boy runs, Meredith speaks of him as being seen to
bound "and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft, clapping heels." If a
woman runs, Meredith writes: "She was fleet; she ran as though a
hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the
lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden
pair multiply one another to speed her.... Suddenly her flight wound
to an end in a dozen twittering steps, and she sank." If a heroine
of eighteen would take leave of her admirer, she says: "We have met.
It is more than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it be forever.
Oh, terrible word! Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to
us for our sole riches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures,
and is the passport given by Abnegation unto Woe that prays to quit
this probationary sphere."

Fancy any human being--least of all a girl--discoursing thus! But,
no matter how simple a thought or action, Meredith sends it forth
arrayed in finer gear than Solomon in all his glory. It is
beribboned with metaphor and personification; it is beflounced with
epigram and allegory. It is truth rendered more precious, as the
medieval critics advised, by being wrapped in sayings not to be
lightly understood by the vulgar. So, when a lover admires the
chasteness of his lady, Meredith remarks: "He saw the Goddess
Modesty guarding Purity; and one would be bold to say that he did
not hear the precepts, Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal,
cawing approval of her over their munching gums."

But Meredith's gift of phrase and his knack of knocking out
epigrams, and his mastery over metaphor and lyrical description
cannot be too highly commended. Diana is "wind-blown but ascending."
When Redworth sees her kindling a fire, "a little mouse of a thought
scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along
the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows." After Sandra's
singing, the stillness settled back again "like one folding up a
precious jewel." A dull professor "pores over a little inexactitude
in phrases and pecks at it like a domestic fowl." Of one who has
ceased to love we hear that "the passion in her was like a place of
waves evaporated to a crust of salt." Of a lady's letter we learn
that it "flourished with light strokes all over, like a field of the
bearded barley." Of a heroine we are told that: "She was not of the
creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement; she took
it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood
with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about her;
one or two of which her dainty hand caressed fearless of a sting;
the lady patted them as her swans." There is brilliant illumination
in such comparisons, a light shed instantaneously upon traits and
mental experiences otherwise not to be revealed. When the Egoist
would affectionately approach his shrinking Clara, nothing could
better deliver the situation than Meredith's simile: "The gulf of a
caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing under the
curled ridge. She stooped to a buttercup; the monster swept by."

It is felicity in the use of rhetorical figure that enables Meredith
to characterize the style of a Carlyle as, "resembling either early
architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a
wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an
appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without
commencement running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against
a sea wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang,
and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving
clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind
of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints." It is
Meredith's gift for phrase that enables him to paint those wonderful
backgrounds for action which are the despair of common writers.
Sometimes the scenes are sketched in with but a touch or two of
suggestion. So, when Richard Feverel and Lucy spend an evening
afloat, Meredith writes: "Hanging between two heavens on the lake:
floating to her voice: the moon stepping over and through white
shoals of soft high clouds above and below: floating to her
voice--no other breath abroad! His soul went out of his body as he
listened." Or, when Richard, in gay company, passes a night at
Richmond, Meredith says simply: "Silver was seen far out on Thames.
The wine ebbed, and the laughter. Sentiment and cigars took up the
wondrous tale."

Sometimes the description is long and minute, but always it is
beautifully fresh. Thus the coming of dawn is pictured in _The
Amazing Marriage_: "The smell of rock-waters and roots of herb and
moss grew keen; air became a wine that raised the breast high to
drink it; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights.... The plumes
of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted
from brown to purple black.... The armies of the young sunrise in
mountain-lands neighbouring the plains, vast shadows, were marching
over woods and meads, black against the edge of golden; and great
heights were cut with them, and bounding waters took the leap in a
silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and dark-banded valleys were
like night and morning taking hands down the sweep of their
rivers."


IV

Meredith's style receives its final and distinctive flavor, however,
from the liberal dash of aphorism with which his books are
sprinkled. Often an epigram will turn upon some metaphor. Such is
the statement that: "A bone in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and
worry corrects the vagrancies and promotes the healthy activities,
whether there be marrow in it or not," or the exclamation: "Who are
not fools to be set spinning, if we choose to whip them with their
vanity! It is the consolation of the great to watch them spin."
Such, too, is the reflection that: "Most of the people one has at
table are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a
sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one another, they
call it conversation." More frequently, the epigram is a neat
generalization left abstract, as for example: "Who rises from prayer
a better man, his prayer is answered"; "Cynics are only happy in
making the world as barren to others as they have made it for
themselves"; "Fools run jabbering of the irony of fate to escape the
annoyance of tracing the causes"; "Expediency is man's wisdom; doing
right is God's"; "Women cannot repose on a man who is not positive;
nor have they much gratification in confounding him"; "Convictions
are generally first impressions sealed with later prejudices"; "The
hero of two women must die and be wept over in common before they
can appreciate one another."

A thousand such jewels glitter in the richly wrought tapestry of
Meredith's style. That he painstakingly inserted them and wove this
fabric to attract attention by its singularity and beauty, he
cheerfully admits in a passage of _Emilia in England_. "The point to
be considered," he there remarks, "is whether fiction demands a
perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a
philosophical work should. When we ask for facts simply we feel the
intrusion of style. Of fiction it is a part. In the one case the
classical robe, in the other any medieval phantasy of clothing."

The difficulty with a style so artificial and intellectualized is
obvious. Meredith, according to Brownell, "flatters one's cleverness
at first, but in the end he fatigues it." The perpetual crackle of
aphorism and metaphor surprises, gratifies, and then wearies; for a
writer who will never say a plain thing plainly, not only keeps his
readers under strain, but soon seems himself to be straining.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Meredith's predilection for
repeating a single happy phrase such as the epithet "rogue in
porcelain" applied to a heroine. Since the phrase tickles his fancy,
he plays with it, drops it, picks it up, mumbles it over and over as
a dog might a bone, and through chapter after chapter is ready at
any pretext to run round and round with it barking. Despite his
assiduous striving for novelty, therefore, Meredith is often
tedious, an effect induced, not merely by his style (whether
repetitious or gasping after eccentricity), but also by his method.
He is so intent upon weaving his commentary upon every speech and
action that the occasion of the commentary is smothered. A phrase
becomes the text of a sermon, a gesture the excuse for paragraphs of
oblique reflection. Thus he forfeits the advantage of downright
sincerity and of forthright progress, and teases interest out of all
patience.


V

Since Meredith is an intellectualist, we naturally ask what may be
his philosophy. Unlike Ibsen or Browning, he preaches no doctrine.
He offers no explicit theory of life. Nor does he, like Dickens or
Reade or Brieux, advocate any special reform. He is never a
propagandist. Some have lamented this fact; more have seen in it an
argument for his universality and permanence. Though he fight no
battles for specific causes, his influence is arrayed in general
against certain tendencies that he disapproves and would laugh to
defeat. Egoism, sentimentalism, hypocrisy, are fair game for his
comedy. As an intellectualist he dislikes and distrusts excess of
emotion--feeling indulged for its own sake. "Sentimentalists," he
declares, "are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the immense
debtorship for a thing done."

Well might Mrs. Carlyle complain that Meredith's work lacked tears.
That it does so he would be the first to admit, for he questions the
worth of pathos for any true captain of his soul. "Pathos is a tide;
often it carries the awakener of it off his feet," Meredith writes.
"We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to the work of
calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble jump away
from the rock after that venerable lawgiver had knocked the water
out of it." So Meredith sacrifices passion to analysis. His heroes
and heroines rarely love so simply and so ardently as do Richard and
Lucy; but the affection of even this delectable pair is modified in
presentation by the playful cynicism of the narrator of their story.
On the other hand, it is futile to cavil at Meredith or any other
artist for lacking such qualities as are incompatible with those he
most notably possesses. You cannot expect abandon of passion in the
characters of a novelist whose forte is detachment and sublimated
common sense. Your intellectualist is not to be blamed if he fails
to write as a sentimentalist.

Meredith's positive philosophy has been formulated by Elmer J.
Bailey in terms that may be briefly paraphrased: Meredith thinks of
man as torn between Nature and Circumstance. By Nature is meant the
world of instinct, of healthy normal impulse. By Circumstance is
meant the world of artificial laws erected by society as the
machinery for its conduct and control. Nature is spontaneous;
Circumstance is traditional. Man may err by allowing to either undue
dominance. His only safety lies in the use of his reason which will
enable him to keep both Nature and Circumstance in proper equipoise.
And the most serviceable instrument of reason for detecting the
follies of convention or of feeling is the comic spirit. Without
this spirit we are not truly intellectual, for, as Meredith has
said: "Not to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a
mind." Let us possess mind, he seems to urge, and through mind
cultivate the soul. In _The Tragic Comedians_ he remarks: "It is the
soul which does things in life--the rest is vapor.... Action means
life to the soul as to the body.... Compromise is virtual death; it
is the pact between cowardice and comfort, under the title of
expediency. So do we gather dead matter about us. So are we
gradually self-stifled, corrupt. The war with evil in every form
must be incessant; we cannot have peace." The serious note here
sounded may be heard again in his letter to a friend, Mrs. Gilman.
There Meredith says: "I have written always with the perception that
there is no life but of the spirit; that the concrete is the
shadowy; yet that the way to spiritual life lies in the complete
unfolding of the creature, not in the nipping of his passions. An
outrage to nature helps to extinguish his light."


VI

Just such an outrage to nature perpetrated with the best intentions,
but in blind folly, is the subject of Meredith's novel, _The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel_. A dogmatic and conventional father endeavors to
determine his son's life according to an infallible system of
parental dictation. Instead of allowing the boy to develop naturally
from within, Sir Austin seeks to mould him absolutely from without.
The failure of this experiment makes the story. The first eleven
chapters are in a sense introductory. They present to the reader the
members of the Feverel family and describe with gusto a poaching
escapade of Richard's youth. From this first ordeal he emerges
triumphant by obeying the impulse of his heart to make frank
confession, despite his father's endeavor to patch up the matter by
plotting. Then, in the next twenty chapters, follows the account of
Richard's passion for the lovely Lucy and of the machinations of
those who would nip it in the bud. All these checks are for the
moment overcome when Richard, after having suffered separation from
Lucy, is again thrown with her by chance and impulsively marries
her.

In the chapters next ensuing Sir Austin, instead of gracefully
accepting defeat, masks and crushes his emotions and permits his
Mephistophelian nephew, the cynical Adrian, to scheme for Richard's
alienation from his bride. Richard is lured away and succumbs to the
spell of a wicked enchantress whom at first he has thought to
reform; and then, shamed and distraught, he wanders abroad, seeking
a purge for his sin. Meanwhile, the deserted wife, at Adrian's
instigation, has been assailed by a villain, the husband of
Richard's enchantress. Issuing unscathed from her ordeal, Lucy is
tardily accepted by the complacent Sir Austin and received, with her
child, at his house. Since Richard has at length achieved
self-mastery and has resolved to return and confess to his wife, and
plead for her grace, a general reconciliation seems imminent. But
the novelist will not allow his tale to end happily lest its moral
be frustrate. Accordingly, although Richard returns for an hour to
be freely forgiven by Lucy, he dashes away forthwith, despite her
entreaties, to duel with her persecutor. Joy, even yet, might emerge
from disaster, since Richard escapes from the duel with only a
wound, but the author continues implacable. His heroine, in nursing
her husband, succumbs to a strain long protracted, and Richard,
though recovered in body, is left but a wreck of his former self.
Such is the desolating outcome of attempting to regulate healthy
human loves by a worldly system.

What is tragic for hero and heroine is gravely comic to the eye of
the intellectualist surveying the folly of men from a height far
above the troubled waves of their passion. For Meredith, Sir Austin
incarnates a comic error. His story is the comedy of one who
theorizes at length upon life, but utterly fails to deal with it
practically. Of course Sir Austin takes no blame to himself. It is
useless, he reflects, "to base any system on a human being," even
though this is precisely what he has done. And when Richard is to
return to his wife, and Sir Austin has at last grown kind to her, we
hear that: "He could now admit that instinct had so far beaten
science; for, as Richard was coming, as all were to be happy, his
wisdom embraced them all paternally as the author of their
happiness." Of Sir Austin, Meredith remarks: "He had experimented on
humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once,
when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity's failings
fell on the shoulders of his son." The reader's inevitable reaction
to the novel is expressed by Lady Blandish: "Oh! how sick I am of
theories and systems and the pretensions of men!... I shall hate the
name of science till the day I die. Give me nothing but commonplace,
unpretending people!"

That the plot of _Richard Feverel_ unduly tantalizes goes without
saying. The author keeps his hero and heroine apart by main force.
Granting that Richard is the victim of rascals, as well as of a
ridiculous system, his easy desertion of the wife whom he loves and
his continued separation from her seem to lie in Meredith's will
rather than in that of his hero. Richard's yielding to Mrs. Mount,
described with remarkable power, is more natural, but his mooning
about Germany while Lucy is left to struggle alone is as
exasperating as her failure to apprise him of the fact that she is
to bear him a child. Splendid as is the last meeting of Richard and
Lucy, declared by Stevenson to be "the strongest scene since
Shakespeare in the English tongue," it forfeits something of
greatness because of perversity. More natural is the faint sub-plot
intended to echo the central theme of the book in its story of
Clare's hopeless love for Richard, at first reciprocated, and then
blocked by Sir Austin and the girl's mother.


VII

In characterization, this novel excels. Its folk are persons and not
alone types. Chief of the Feverel clan is Richard's father, Sir
Austin, wounded by the infidelity of his wife and his friend, yet an
intellectual egoist, proud of his plans for ruling the family and
equally proud of his epigrams. Given less fully are Richard's aunt,
the worldly mother of Clare, and his uncles--the guardsman Algernon,
who has lost a leg at cricket, and crochety Hippias, "the dyspepsy."
Of Richard's cousins one is sympathetic, and the other is Satanic.
The first, Austin Wentworth, lives in disgrace for having repaired a
youthful indiscretion by marrying a housemaid. As for the second,
Adrian Harley, "the Wise Youth," he is Richard's tutor, whose heart
has dropped to his stomach, a clever worldling and the contemner of
honest passion, one of the most accomplished cynics of all
literature. There are minor characters, too, but equally vital, from
blunt Farmer Blaize and his son, and the disgruntled farm-hand Tom
Bakewell, to Sir Austin's sentimental companion Lady Blandish, and
Ripton, the faithful old dog.

Of the women three stand to the fore--Lucy, Mrs. Mount, and Mrs.
Berry. The adorable Lucy is a northern Juliet brought to sudden
maturity by her passion for Richard. Beneath him in birth, she is
more than his equal in manner and mind and spirit. Though shown only
in glimpses, she is never less than entrancing. Mrs. Mount is the
dashing temptress, a little worn and half-hearted until piqued by
Richard's indifference into playing her game more earnestly, and
then exerting all the fascinations of the wicked. Most original of
the three is Lucy's vulgar befriender, Mrs. Berry, a lovable
"old-black-satin bunch," as Meredith tags her, wise but irrelevant,
aware of the sensual springs beneath our polite pretenses, a
Juliet's nurse grown mellow. It is to be noted, however, that none
of these characters is really dynamic, unless it be Mrs. Doria
Forey, who suffers a change of heart after sacrificing that of her
daughter, and Richard who somewhat alters under the stress of his
ordeal.

Subordinate to character, plot, and central idea, yet scarcely less
effective in producing the total effect of the novel, are its
setting, its style, and its author's point of view. Already
Meredith's point of view has been defined as that of the writer of
comedy. In the dinner scene at Richmond, for example, you are
conscious of the author smiling apart upon callow Richard and Ripton
caught in the snares of the demi-monde. It is Thackeray over again,
letting us see the self-deception of Pendennis in his admiration of
the Fotheringay. Sometimes, in this novel, Meredith apostrophizes
his people, emitting lyrical exclamations of admiration or disgust
at their conduct. More often, he remains aloof, though none the less
present in spirit. Rarely does he here conform to Brownell's
statement, more applicable to his later fictions, that: "He is not
merely detached, he is obliterated. All he shows us of himself is
his talent; his standpoint is to be divined."

That which especially reveals the author's standpoint is what
Professor Saintsbury, in referring to this novel, has termed its
"style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of strange ironic
persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression." The
persiflage appears, above all, in the speeches of the saturnine
Adrian. As for the epigrams, their number is justified in part by
supposing them to come from Sir Austin's collection entitled "The
Pilgrim's Scrip." They abound, however, in the speech of others and
in the narrative proper. Typical spicings of style are the
following: "To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half
traversed the world is youth's foolishness"; "It is difficult for
those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their
children are thinking on their own account"; "If immeasurable love
were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate
Providence to another"; "The ways of women, which are involution,
and their practices, which are opposition, are generally best hit
upon by guesswork and a bold word"; "The God of this world is in the
machine, not out of it"; "Sentimentalism is a happy pastime and an
important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a
damning one to them who have anything to forfeit"; "The task of
reclaiming a bad man is extremely seductive to good women. Dear to
their tender hearts as old china is a bad man they are mending."
Even illiterate Mrs. Berry talks in epigram, now on checked
matrimony, which she holds to be as injurious as checked
perspiration, and now on the wickedness of old people, which, she
affirms, is the excuse for the wildness of young ones. "I think it's
always the plan in a 'dielemmer,'" she says, "to pray God and walk
forward." To Lucy, the bride, she gives this advice: "When the
parlour fire gets low, put coals on the kitchen fire.... Don't
neglect your cookery. Kissing don't last; cookery do."

Aside from its aphorisms, the style of _Feverel_ is essentially
clever, but by no means so artificial as that of Meredith's later
novels. If a stage direction seem occasionally over-elaborate, as:
"Adrian gesticulated an acquiesced withdrawal," others are
felicitous, as: "At last Hippias perspired in conviction," or: "He
set his sight hard at the blue ridges of the hills," or, of Ripton
draining a bumper at a gulp: "The farthing rushlight of his reason
leapt and expired. He tumbled to the sofa and there stretched."
There are fine passages, too, of description, like those concerned
with the boyish adventures of Richard and Ripton, the Ferdinand and
Miranda meeting of hero and heroine, the temptation episode, and the
storm in the German forest by night. "Up started the whole forest in
violet fire. He saw the country at the foot of the hills to the
bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished.... Lower down the
abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash; then white thrusts of
light were darted from the sky, and great curving ferns, seen
steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally agitated and
vanished. Then a shrilling song roused in the leaves and the
herbage. Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the
deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of the
earth." Admirable, also, are the mere hints of background given in a
flashing phrase that conjures up the scene: "Look at those old elm
branches! How they seem to mix among the stars!--glittering prints
of winter."

Taken all in all, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ may be reckoned as
Meredith's masterpiece. "My old conviction grows stronger," writes Le
Galliene, "that it will be _Richard Feverel_ and perhaps no other of
his novels ... that will keep his name alive in English literature."
Certainly, Meredith has here allowed to his characters a charm of
personality that later he tends to sacrifice in stressing their purely
typical traits. He shows here a fire of sincerity rarely afterwards
burning so brightly. He is less the mere essayist and more the lyric
and dramatic tale-teller. He has set forth with skill the elements of
a large problem, confirming the truth of Chesterton's remark that he
combines subtlety with primal energy, and criticizes life without losing
his appetite for it.

                                            FRANK WADLEIGH CHANDLER.
  UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI.




THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL




CHAPTER I

THE INMATES OF RAYNHAM ABBEY


Some years ago a book was published under the title of "The
Pilgrim's Scrip." It consisted of a selection of original aphorisms
by an anonymous gentleman, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised
heart to the world.

He made no pretension to novelty. "Our new thoughts have thrilled
dead bosoms," he wrote; by which avowal it may be seen that youth
had manifestly gone from him, since he had ceased to be jealous of
the ancients. There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for
those days of intellectual coxcombry, when ideas come to us
affecting the embraces of virgins, and swear to us they are ours
alone, and no one else have they ever visited: and we believe them.

For an example of his ideas of the sex he said:

"I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man."

Some excitement was produced in the bosoms of ladies by so monstrous
a scorn of them.

One adventurous person betook herself to the Heralds' College, and
there ascertained that a Griffin between two Wheatsheaves, which
stood on the title-page of the book, formed the crest of Sir Austin
Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Baronet, of Raynham Abbey, in a certain
Western county folding Thames: a man of wealth and honour, and a
somewhat lamentable history.

The outline of the baronet's story was by no means new. He had a
wife, and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was
a beauty; his friend was a sort of poet. His wife had his whole
heart, and his friend all his confidence. When he selected Denzil
Somers from among his college chums, it was not on account of any
similarity of disposition between them, but from his intense worship
of genius, which made him overlook the absence of principle in his
associate for the sake of such brilliant promise. Denzil had a small
patrimony to lead off with, and that he dissipated before he left
college; henceforth he was dependent upon his admirer, with whom he
lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and
launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for
being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way,
practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist,
entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier
poems, published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure
and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting
in their moral tone, that his reputation was great among the
virtuous, who form the larger portion of the English book-buying
public. Election-seasons called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of
the Tory party. Diaper possessed undoubted fluency, but did little,
though Sir Austin was ever expecting much of him.

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in
moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who,
now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn
off; and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are
not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome
household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme.
Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was
jealous of her husband's friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In
time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio
and Mary together.

    "For I am not the first who found
    The name of Mary fatal!"

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.

Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it
up. He had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to
the one, and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be
brother and sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at
Raynham. In fact, he had been prodigal of the excellences of his
nature, which it is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became
bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter
of an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct
struck but at the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin
was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love
upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put
him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she
had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a
pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush
the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised
to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened
the world's fair aspect for him.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved
his wonted demeanour, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs.
Doria Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired
from his Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and
that kind of thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in
public and private, was, that the light thing who had taken flight
was but a feather on her brother's Feverel-heart, and his ordinary
course of life would be resumed. There are times when common men
cannot bear the weight of just so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his
brothers, thought him immensely improved by his misfortune, if the
loss of such a person could be so designated; and seeing that
Hippias received in consequence free quarters at Raynham, and
possession of the wing of the Abbey she had inhabited, it is
profitable to know his thoughts. If the baronet had given two or
three blazing dinners in the great hall he would have deceived
people generally, as he did his relatives and intimates. He was too
sick for that: fit only for passive acting.

The nurse-maid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure
darkening a lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so
used to the sight as never to wake with a start. One night she was
strangely aroused by a sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside
the cot in his long black cloak and travelling cap. His fingers
shaded a lamp, and reddened against the fitful darkness that ever
and anon went leaping up the wall. She could hardly believe her
senses to see the austere gentleman, dead silent, dropping tear upon
tear before her eyes. She lay stone-still in a trance of terror and
mournfulness, mechanically counting the tears as they fell, one by
one. The hidden face, the fall and flash of those heavy drops in the
light of the lamp he held, the upright, awful figure, agitated at
regular intervals like a piece of clockwork by the low murderous
catch of his breath: it was so piteous to her poor human nature that
her heart began wildly palpitating. Involuntarily the poor girl
cried out to him, "Oh, sir!" and fell a-weeping. Sir Austin turned
the lamp on her pillow, and harshly bade her go to sleep, striding
from the room forthwith. He dismissed her with a purse the next day.

Once, when he was seven years old, the little fellow woke up at
night to see a lady bending over him. He talked of this the next
day, but it was treated as a dream; until in the course of the day
his uncle Algernon was driven home from Lobourne cricket-ground with
a broken leg. Then it was recollected that there was a family ghost;
and, though no member of the family believed in the ghost, none
would have given up a circumstance that testified to its existence;
for to possess a ghost is a distinction above titles.

Algernon Feverel lost his leg, and ceased to be a gentleman in the
Guards. Of the other uncles of young Richard, Cuthbert, the sailor,
perished in a spirited boat expedition against a slaving negro chief
up the Niger. Some of the gallant lieutenant's trophies of war
decorated the little boy's play-shed at Raynham, and he bequeathed
his sword to Richard, whose hero he was. The diplomatist and beau,
Vivian, ended his flutterings from flower to flower by making an
improper marriage, as is the fate of many a beau, and was struck out
of the list of visitors. Algernon generally occupied the baronet's
disused town-house, a wretched being, dividing his time between
horse and card exercise: possessed, it was said, of the absurd
notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing his leg may
regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least, whenever he and his
brother Hippias got together, they never failed to try whether one
leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a puritan as Sir Austin
was in his habits, he was too good a host, and too thorough a
gentleman, to impose them upon his guests. The brothers, and other
relatives, might do as they would while they did not disgrace the
name, and then it was final: they must depart to behold his
countenance no more.

Algernon Feverel was a simple man, who felt, subsequent to his
misfortune, as he had perhaps dimly fancied it before, that his
career lay in his legs, and was now irrevocably cut short. He taught
the boy boxing, and shooting, and the arts of fence, and
superintended the direction of his animal vigour with a melancholy
vivacity. The remaining energies of Algernon's mind were devoted to
animadversions on swift bowling. He preached it over the county,
struggling through laborious literary compositions, addressed to
sporting newspapers, on the Decline of Cricket. It was Algernon who
witnessed and chronicled young Richard's first fight, which was with
young Tom Blaize of Belthorpe Farm, three years the boy's senior.

Hippias Feverel was once thought to be the genius of the family. It
was his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach; and,
as one is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged
in a perpetual contention with his dinner, Hippias forsook his
prospects at the Bar, and, in the embraces of dyspepsia, compiled
his ponderous work on the Fairy Mythology of Europe. He had little
to do with the Hope of Raynham beyond what he endured from his
juvenile tricks.

A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt Grantley, who had money to
bequeath to the heir, occupied with Hippias the background of the
house and shared her caudles with him. These two were seldom seen
till the dinner-hour, for which they were all day preparing; and
probably all night remembering, for the Eighteenth Century was an
admirable trencherman, and cast age aside while there was a dish on
the table.

Mrs. Doria Forey was the eldest of the three sisters of the baronet,
a florid affable woman, with fine teeth, exceedingly fine light wavy
hair, a Norman nose, and a reputation for understanding men; and
that, with these practical creatures, always means the art of
managing them. She had married an expectant younger son of a good
family, who deceased before the fulfilment of his prospects; and,
casting about in her mind the future chances of her little daughter
and sole child, Clare, she marked down a probability. The far sight,
the deep determination, the resolute perseverance of her sex, where
a daughter is to be provided for and a man to be overthrown,
instigated her to invite herself to Raynham, where, with that
daughter, she fixed herself.

The other two Feverel ladies were the wife of Colonel Wentworth and
the widow of Mr. Justice Harley: and the only thing remarkable about
them was that they were mothers of sons of some distinction.

Austin Wentworth's story was of that wretched character which to be
comprehended, that justice should be dealt him, must be told out and
openly; which no one dares now do.

For a fault in early youth, redeemed by him nobly, according to his
light, he was condemned to undergo the world's harsh judgment: not
for the fault--for its atonement.

"--Married his mother's housemaid," whispered Mrs. Doria, with a
ghastly look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments,
which he was reputed to entertain.

"The compensation for Injustice," says the "Pilgrim's Scrip," "is,
that in that dark Ordeal we gather the worthiest around us."

And the baronet's fair friend, Lady Blandish, and some few true men
and women, held Austin Wentworth high.

He did not live with his wife; and Sir Austin, whose mind was bent
on the future of our species, reproached him with being barren to
posterity, while knaves were propagating.

The principal characteristic of the second nephew, Adrian Harley,
was his sagacity. He was essentially the wise youth, both in counsel
and in action.

"In action," the "Pilgrim's Scrip" observes, "Wisdom goes by
majorities."

Adrian had an instinct for the majority, and, as the world
invariably found him enlisted in its ranks, his appellation of wise
youth was acquiesced in without irony.

The wise youth, then, had the world with him, but no friends. Nor
did he wish for those troublesome appendages of success. He caused
himself to be required by people who could serve him; feared by such
as could injure. Not that he went out of the way to secure his end,
or risked the expense of a plot. He did the work as easily as he ate
his daily bread. Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would
have scourged out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our
modern notions. To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his
character, was the wise youth's problem for life. He had no
intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine
aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had
been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of Gods in
the background. Why not laughter of mortals also? Adrian had his
laugh in his comfortable corner. He possessed peculiar attributes of
a heathen God. He was a disposer of men: he was polished, luxurious,
and happy--at their cost. He lived in eminent self-content, as one
lying on soft cloud, lapt in sunshine. Nor Jove, nor Apollo, cast
eye upon the maids of earth with cooler fire of selection, or
pursued them in the covert with more sacred impunity. And he enjoyed
his reputation for virtue as something additional. Stolen fruits are
said to be sweet; undeserved rewards are exquisite.

The best of it was, that Adrian made no pretences. He did not
solicit the favourable judgment of the world. Nature and he
attempted no other concealment than the ordinary mask men wear. And
yet the world would proclaim him moral, as well as wise, and the
pleasing converse every way of his disgraced cousin Austin.

In a word, Adrian Harley had mastered his philosophy at the early
age of one-and-twenty. Many would be glad to say the same at that
age twice-told: they carry in their breasts a burden with which
Adrian's was not loaded. Mrs. Doria was nearly right about his
heart. A singular mishap (at his birth, possibly, or before it) had
unseated that organ, and shaken it down to his stomach, where it was
a much lighter, nay, an inspiring weight, and encouraged him merrily
onward. Throned there it looked on little that did not arrive to
gratify it. Already that region was a trifle prominent in the person
of the wise youth, and carried, as it were, the flag of his
philosophical tenets in front of him. He was charming after dinner,
with men or with women: delightfully sarcastic: perhaps a little too
unscrupulous in his moral tone, but that his moral reputation belied
him, and it must be set down to generosity of disposition.

Such was Adrian Harley, another of Sir Austin's intellectual
favourites, chosen from mankind to superintend the education of his
son at Raynham. Adrian had been destined for the Church. He did not
enter into Orders. He and the baronet had a conference together one
day, and from that time Adrian became a fixture in the Abbey. His
father died in his promising son's college term, bequeathing him
nothing but his legal complexion, and Adrian became stipendiary
officer in his uncle's household.

A playfellow of Richard's occasionally, and the only comrade of his
age that he ever saw, was Master Ripton Thompson, the son of Sir
Austin's solicitor, a boy without a character.

A comrade of some description was necessary, for Richard was neither
to go to school nor to college. Sir Austin considered that the
schools were corrupt, and maintained that young lads might by
parental vigilance be kept pretty secure from the Serpent until Eve
sided with him: a period that might be deferred, he said. He had a
system of education for his son. How it worked we shall see.




CHAPTER II

SHOWING HOW THE FATES SELECTED THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY TO TRY THE
STRENGTH OF THE SYSTEM


October shone royally on Richard's fourteenth birthday. The brown
beechwoods and golden birches glowed to a brilliant sun. Banks of
moveless cloud hung about the horizon, mounded to the west, where
slept the wind. Promise of a great day for Raynham, as it proved to
be, though not in the manner marked out.

Already archery-booths and cricketing-tents were rising on the lower
grounds towards the river, whither the lads of Bursley and Lobourne,
in boats and in carts, shouting for a day of ale and honour, jogged
merrily to match themselves anew, and pluck at the living laurel
from each other's brows, like manly Britons. The whole park was
beginning to be astir and resound with holiday cries. Sir Austin
Feverel, a thorough good Tory, was no game-preserver, and could be
popular whenever he chose, which Sir Miles Papworth, on the other
side of the river, a fast-handed Whig and terror to poachers, never
could be. Half the village of Lobourne was seen trooping through the
avenues of the park. Fiddlers and gipsies clamoured at the gates for
admission; white smocks, and slate, surmounted by hats of serious
brim, and now and then a scarlet cloak, smacking of the old country,
dotted the grassy sweeps to the levels.

And all the time the star of these festivities was receding further
and further, and eclipsing himself with his reluctant serf Ripton,
who kept asking what they were to do and where they were going, and
how late it was in the day, and suggesting that the lads of Lobourne
would be calling out for them, and Sir Austin requiring their
presence, without getting any attention paid to his misery or
remonstrances. For Richard had been requested by his father to
submit to medical examination like a boor enlisting for a soldier,
and he was in great wrath.

He was flying as though he would have flown from the shameful
thought of what had been asked of him. By-and-by he communicated his
sentiments to Ripton, who said they were those of a girl: an
offensive remark, remembering which, Richard, after they had
borrowed a couple of guns at the bailiff's farm, and Ripton had
fired badly, called his friend a fool.

Feeling that circumstances were making him look wonderfully like
one, Ripton lifted his head and retorted defiantly, "I'm not!"

This angry contradiction, so very uncalled for, annoyed Richard, who
was still smarting at the loss of the birds, owing to Ripton's bad
shot, and was really the injured party. He therefore bestowed the
abusive epithet on Ripton anew, and with increase of emphasis.

"You shan't call me so, then, whether I am or not," says Ripton, and
sucks his lips.

This was becoming personal. Richard sent up his brows, and stared at
his defier an instant. He then informed him that he certainly should
call him so, and would not object to call him so twenty times.

"Do it, and see!" returns Ripton, rocking on his feet, and breathing
quick.

With a gravity of which only boys and other barbarians are capable,
Richard went through the entire number, stressing the epithet to
increase the defiance and avoid monotony, as he progressed, while
Ripton bobbed his head every time in assent, as it were, to his
comrade's accuracy, and as a record for his profound humiliation.
The dog they had with them gazed at the extraordinary performance
with interrogating wags of the tail.

Twenty times, duly and deliberately, Richard repeated the obnoxious
word.

At the twentieth solemn iteration of Ripton's capital shortcoming,
Ripton delivered a smart back-hander on Richard's mouth, and squared
precipitately; perhaps sorry when the deed was done, for he was a
kind-hearted lad, and as Richard simply bowed in acknowledgment of
the blow he thought he had gone too far. He did not know the young
gentleman he was dealing with. Richard was extremely cool.

"Shall we fight here?" he said.

"Anywhere you like," replied Ripton.

"A little more into the wood, I think. We may be interrupted." And
Richard led the way with a courteous reserve that somewhat chilled
Ripton's ardour for the contest. On the skirts of the wood, Richard
threw off his jacket and waistcoat, and, quite collected, waited for
Ripton to do the same. The latter boy was flushed and restless;
older and broader, but not so tight-limbed and well-set. The Gods,
sole witnesses of their battle, betted dead against him. Richard had
mounted the white cockade of the Feverels, and there was a look in
him that asked for tough work to extinguish. His brows, slightly
lined upward at the temples, converging to a knot about the well-set
straight nose; his full grey eyes, open nostrils, and planted feet,
and a gentlemanly air of calm and alertness, formed a spirited
picture of a young combatant. As for Ripton, he was all abroad, and
fought in schoolboy style--that is, he rushed at the foe head
foremost, and struck like a windmill. He was a lumpy boy. When he
did hit, he made himself felt; but he was at the mercy of science.
To see him come dashing in, blinking and puffing and whirling his
arms abroad while the felling blow went straight between them, you
perceived that he was fighting a fight of desperation, and knew it.
For the dreaded alternative glared him in the face that, if he
yielded, he must look like what he had been twenty times
calumniously called; and he would die rather than yield, and swing
his windmill till he dropped. Poor boy! he dropped frequently. The
gallant fellow fought for appearances, and down he went. The Gods
favour one of two parties. Prince Turnus was a noble youth; but he
had not Pallas at his elbow. Ripton was a capital boy; he had no
science. He could not prove he was not a fool! When one comes to
think of it, Ripton did choose the only possible way, and we should
all of us have considerable difficulty in proving the negative by
any other. Ripton came on the unerring fist again and again; and if
it was true, as he said in short colloquial gasps, that he required
as much beating as an egg to be beaten thoroughly, a fortunate
interruption alone saved our friend from resembling that substance.
The boys heard summoning voices, and beheld Mr. Morton of Poer Hall
and Austin Wentworth stepping towards them.

A truce was sounded, jackets were caught up, guns shouldered, and
off they trotted in concert through the depths of the wood, not
stopping till that and half-a-dozen fields and a larch plantation
were well behind them.

When they halted to take breath, there was a mutual study of faces.
Ripton's was much discoloured, and looked fiercer with its natural
war-paint than the boy felt. Nevertheless, he squared up dauntlessly
on the new ground, and Richard, whose wrath was appeased, could not
refrain from asking him whether he had not really had enough.

"Never!" shouts the noble enemy.

"Well, look here," said Richard, appealing to common sense, "I'm
tired of knocking you down. I'll say you're not a fool, if you'll
give me your hand."

Ripton demurred an instant to consult with honour, who bade him
catch at his chance.

He held out his hand. "There!" and the boys grasped hands and were
fast friends. Ripton had gained his point, and Richard decidedly had
the best of it. So they were on equal ground. Both could claim a
victory, which was all the better for their friendship.

Ripton washed his face and comforted his nose at a brook, and was
now ready to follow his friend wherever he chose to lead. They
continued to beat about for birds. The birds on the Raynham estates
were found singularly cunning, and repeatedly eluded the aim of
these prime shots, so they pushed their expedition into the lands of
their neighbours, in search of a stupider race, happily oblivious of
the laws and conditions of trespass; unconscious, too, that they
were poaching on the demesne of the notorious Farmer Blaize, the
free-trade farmer under the shield of the Papworths, no worshipper
of the Griffin between two Wheatsheaves; destined to be much allied
with Richard's fortunes from beginning to end. Farmer Blaize hated
poachers, and especially young chaps poaching, who did it mostly
from impudence. He heard the audacious shots popping right and left,
and going forth to have a glimpse at the intruders, and observing
their size, swore he would teach my gentlemen a thing, lords or no
lords.

Richard had brought down a beautiful cock-pheasant, and was
exulting over it, when the farmer's portentous figure burst upon
them, cracking an avenging horsewhip. His salute was ironical.

"Havin' good sport, gentlemen, are ye?"

"Just bagged a splendid bird!" radiant Richard informed him.

"Oh!" Farmer Blaize gave an admonitory flick of the whip.

"Just let me clap eye on't, then."

"Say, please," interposed Ripton, who was not blind to doubtful
aspects.

Farmer Blaize threw up his chin, and grinned grimly.

"Please to you, sir? Why, my chap, you looks as if ye didn't much
mind what come t'yer nose, I reckon. You looks an old poacher, you
do. Tall ye what 'tis!" He changed his banter to business, "That
bird's mine! Now you jest hand him over, and sheer off, you dam
young scoundrels! I know ye!" And he became exceedingly opprobrious,
and uttered contempt of the name of Feverel.

Richard opened his eyes.

"If you wants to be horsewhipped, you'll stay where y'are!"
continued the farmer. "Giles Blaize never stands nonsense!"

"Then we'll stay," quoth Richard.

"Good! so be't! If you will have't, have't, my men!"

As a preparatory measure, Farmer Blaize seized a wing of the bird,
on which both boys flung themselves desperately, and secured it
minus the pinion.

"That's your game," cried the farmer. "Here's a taste of horsewhip
for ye. I never stands nonsense!" and sweetch went the mighty whip,
well swayed. The boys tried to close with him. He kept his distance
and lashed without mercy. Black blood was made by Farmer Blaize that
day! The boys wriggled, in spite of themselves. It was like a
relentless serpent coiling, and biting, and stinging their young
veins to madness. Probably they felt the disgrace of the contortions
they were made to go through more than the pain, but the pain was
fierce, for the farmer laid about from a practised arm, and did not
consider that he had done enough till he was well breathed and his
ruddy jowl inflamed. He paused, to receive the remainder of the
cock-pheasant in his face.

"Take your beastly bird," cried Richard.

"Money, my lads, and interest," roared the farmer, lashing out
again.

Shameful as it was to retreat, there was but that course open to
them. They decided to surrender the field.

"Look! you big brute," Richard shook his gun, hoarse with passion,
"I'd have shot you, if I'd been loaded. Mind! if I come across you
when I'm loaded, you coward, I'll fire!"

The un-English nature of this threat exasperated Farmer Blaize, and
he pressed the pursuit in time to bestow a few farewell stripes as
they were escaping tight-breeched into neutral territory. At the
hedge they parleyed a minute, the farmer to inquire if they had had
a mortal good tanning and were satisfied, for when they wanted a
further instalment of the same they were to come for it to Belthorpe
Farm, and there it was in pickle: The boys meantime exploding in
menaces and threats of vengeance, on which the farmer contemptuously
turned his back. Ripton had already stocked an armful of flints for
the enjoyment of a little skirmishing. Richard, however, knocked
them all out, saying, "No! Gentlemen don't fling stones; leave that
to the blackguards."

"Just one shy at him!" pleaded Ripton, with his eye on Farmer
Blaize's broad mark, and his whole mind drunken with a sudden
revelation of the advantages of light troops in opposition to
heavies.

"No," said Richard, imperatively, "no stones," and marched briskly
away. Ripton followed with a sigh. His leader's magnanimity was
wholly beyond him. A good spanking mark at the farmer would have
relieved Master Ripton; it would have done nothing to console
Richard Feverel for the ignominy he had been compelled to submit to.
Ripton was familiar with the rod, a monster much despoiled of his
terrors by intimacy. Birch-fever was past with this boy. The
horrible sense of shame, self-loathing, universal hatred, impotent
vengeance, as if the spirit were steeped in abysmal blackness, which
comes upon a courageous and sensitive youth condemned for the first
time to taste this piece of fleshly bitterness, and suffer what he
feels is a defilement, Ripton had weathered and forgotten. He was
seasoned wood, and took the world pretty wisely; not reckless of
castigation, as some boys become, nor oversensitive as to dishonour,
as his friend and comrade beside him was.

Richard's blood was poisoned. He had the fever on him severely. He
would not allow stone-flinging, because it was a habit of his to
discountenance it. Mere gentlemanly considerations had scarce
shielded Farmer Blaize, and certain very ungentlemanly schemes were
coming to ghastly heads in the tumult of his brain; rejected solely
from their glaring impracticability even to his young intelligence.
A sweeping and consummate vengeance for the indignity alone should
satisfy him. Something tremendous must be done, and done without
delay. At one moment he thought of killing all the farmer's cattle;
next of killing him; challenging him to single combat with the arms,
and according to the fashion of gentlemen. But the farmer was a
coward; he would refuse. Then he, Richard Feverel, would stand by
the farmer's bedside, and rouse him; rouse him to fight with powder
and ball in his own chamber, in the cowardly midnight, where he
might tremble, but dare not refuse.

"Lord!" cried simple Ripton, while these hopeful plots were raging
in his comrade's brain, now sparkling for immediate execution, and
anon lapsing disdainfully dark in their chances of fulfilment, "how
I wish you'd have let me notch him, Ricky! I'm a safe shot. I never
miss. I should feel quite jolly if I'd spanked him once. We should
have had the best of him at that game. I say!" and a sharp thought
drew Ripton's ideas nearer home, "I wonder whether my nose is as bad
as he says! Where can I see myself?"

To these exclamations Richard was deaf, and he trudged steadily
forward, facing but one object.

After tearing through innumerable hedges, leaping fences, jumping
dykes, penetrating brambly copses, and getting dirty, ragged, and
tired, Ripton awoke from his dream of Farmer Blaize and a blue nose
to the vivid consciousness of hunger; and this grew with the
rapidity of light upon him, till in the course of another minute he
was enduring the extremes of famine, and ventured to question his
leader whither he was being conducted. Raynham was out of sight.
They were a long way down the valley, miles from Lobourne, in a
country of sour pools, yellow brooks, rank pasturage, desolate
heath. Solitary cows were seen; the smoke of a mud cottage; a cart
piled with peat; a donkey grazing at leisure, oblivious of an unkind
world; geese by a horse-pond, gabbling as in the first loneliness of
creation; uncooked things that a famishing boy cannot possibly care
for, and must despise. Ripton was in despair.

"Where _are_ you going to?" he inquired with a voice of the last
time of asking, and halted resolutely.

Richard now broke his silence to reply, "Anywhere."

"Anywhere!" Ripton took up the moody word. "But ain't you awfully
hungry?" he gasped vehemently, in a way that showed the total
emptiness of his stomach.

"No," was Richard's brief response.

"Not hungry!" Ripton's amazement lent him increased vehemence. "Why,
you haven't had anything to eat since breakfast! Not hungry? I
declare I'm starving. I feel such a gnawing I could eat dry bread
and cheese!"

Richard sneered: not for reasons that would have actuated a similar
demonstration of the philosopher.

"Come," cried Ripton, "at all events, tell us where you're going to
stop."

Richard faced about to make a querulous retort. The injured and
hapless visage that met his eye disarmed him. The lad's nose, though
not exactly of the dreaded hue, was really becoming discoloured. To
upbraid him would be cruel. Richard lifted his head, surveyed the
position, and exclaiming "Here!" dropped down on a withered bank,
leaving Ripton to contemplate him as a puzzle whose every new move
was a worse perplexity.




CHAPTER III

THE MAGIAN CONFLICT


Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes, not
written or formally taught, but intuitively understood by all, and
invariably acted upon by the loyal and the true. The race is not
nearly civilized, we must remember. Thus, not to follow your leader
whithersoever he may think proper to lead; to back out of an
expedition because the end of it frowns dubious, and the present
fruit of it is discomfort; to quit a comrade on the road, and return
home without him: these are tricks which no boy of spirit would be
guilty of, let him come to any description of mortal grief in
consequence. Better so than have his own conscience denouncing him
sneak. Some boys who behave boldly enough are not troubled by this
conscience, and the eyes and the lips of their fellows have to
supply the deficiency. They do it with just as haunting, and even
more horrible pertinacity, than the inner voice, and the result, if
the probation be not very severe and searching, is the same. The
leader can rely on the faithfulness of his host: the comrade is
sworn to serve. Master Ripton Thompson was naturally loyal. The idea
of turning off and forsaking his friend never once crossed his mind,
though his condition was desperate, and his friend's behaviour that
of a Bedlamite. He announced several times impatiently that they
would be too late for dinner. His friend did not budge. Dinner
seemed nothing to him. There he lay plucking grass, and patting the
old dog's nose, as if incapable of conceiving what a thing hunger
was. Ripton took half-a-dozen turns up and down, and at last flung
himself down beside the taciturn boy, accepting his fate.

Now, the chance that works for certain purposes sent a smart shower
from the sinking sun, and the wet sent two strangers for shelter in
the lane behind the hedge where the boys reclined. One was a
travelling tinker, who lit a pipe and spread a tawny umbrella. The
other was a burly young countryman, pipeless and tentless. They
saluted with a nod, and began recounting for each other's benefit
the day-long doings of the weather, as it had affected their
individual experience and followed their prophecies. Both had
anticipated and foretold a bit of rain before night, and therefore
both welcomed the wet with satisfaction. A monotonous betweenwhiles
kind of talk they kept droning, in harmony with the still hum of the
air. From the weather theme they fell upon the blessings of tobacco;
how it was the poor man's friend, his company, his consolation, his
comfort, his refuge at night, his first thought in the morning.

"Better than a wife!" chuckled the tinker. "No curtain-lecturin'
with a pipe. Your pipe an't a shrew."

"That be it!" the other chimed in. "Your pipe doan't mak' ye out wi'
all the cash Saturday evenin'."

"Take one," said the tinker, in the enthusiasm of the moment,
handing a grimy short clay. Speed-the-Plough filled from the
tinker's pouch, and continued his praises.

"Penny a day, and there y'are, primed! Better than a wife? Ha, ha!"

"And you can get rid of it, if ye wants for to, and when ye wants,"
added tinker.

"So ye can!" Speed-the-Plough took him up. "And ye doan't want for
to. Leastways, t'other case. I means pipe."

"And," continued tinker, comprehending him perfectly, "it don't
bring repentance after it."

"Not nohow, master, it doan't! And"--Speed-the-Plough cocked his
eye--"it doan't eat up half the victuals, your pipe doan't."

Here the honest yeoman gesticulated his keen sense of a clincher,
which the tinker acknowledged; and having, so to speak, sealed up
the subject by saying the best thing that could be said, the two
smoked for some time in silence to the drip and patter of the
shower.

Ripton solaced his wretchedness by watching them through the briar
hedge. He saw the tinker stroking a white cat, and appealing to her,
every now and then, as his missus, for an opinion or a confirmation;
and he thought that a curious sight. Speed-the-Plough was stretched
at full length, with his boots in the rain, and his head amidst the
tinker's pots, smoking, profoundly contemplative. The minutes seemed
to be taken up alternately by the grey puffs from their mouths.

It was the tinker who renewed the colloquy. Said he, "Times is bad!"

His companion assented, "Sure-ly!"

"But it somehow comes round right," resumed the tinker. "Why, look
here. Where's the good o' moping? I sees it all come round right and
tight. Now I travels about. I've got my beat. 'Casion calls me
t'other day to Newcastle!--Eh?"

"Coals!" ejaculated Speed-the-Plough sonorously.

"Coals!" echoed the tinker. "You ask what I goes there for, mayhap?
Never you mind. One sees a mort o' life in my trade. Not for coals
it isn't. And I don't carry 'em there, neither. Anyhow, I comes
back. London's my mark. Says I, I'll see a bit o' the sea, and steps
aboard a collier. We were as nigh wrecked as the prophet Paul."

"--A--who's him?" the other wished to know.

"Read your Bible," said the tinker. "We pitched and tossed--'tain't
that game at sea 'tis on land, I can tell ye! I thinks, down we're
a-going--say your prayers, Bob Tiles! That was a night, to be sure!
But God's above the devil, and here I am, ye see."

Speed-the-Plough lurched round on his elbow and regarded him
indifferently. "D'ye call that doctrin'? He bean't al'ays, or I
shoo'n't be scrapin' my heels wi' nothin' to do, and, what's warse,
nothin' to eat. Why, look heer. Luck's luck, and bad luck's the
contrary. Varmer Bollop, t'other day, has's rick burnt down. Next
night his gran'ry's burnt. What do he tak' and go and do? He takes
and goes and hangs unsel', and turns us out of his employ. God
warn't above the devil then, I thinks, or I can't make out the
reckonin'."

The tinker cleared his throat, and said it was a bad case.

"And a darn'd bad case. I'll tak' my oath on't!" cried
Speed-the-Plough. "Well, look heer! Heer's another darn'd bad case.
I threshed for Varmer Blaize--Blaize o' Beltharpe--afore I goes to
Varmer Bollop. Varmer Blaize misses pilkins. He swears our chaps
steals pilkins. 'Twarn't me steals 'em. What do _he_ tak' and go and
do? He takes and tarns us off, me and another, neck and crop, to
scuffle about and starve, for all _he_ keers. God warn't above the
devil then, I thinks. Not nohow, as I can see!"

The tinker shook his head, and said that was a bad case also.

"And you can't mend it," added Speed-the-Plough. "It's bad, and
there it be. But I'll tell ye what, master. Bad wants payin' for."
He nodded and winked mysteriously. "Bad has its wages as well's
honest work, I'm thinkin'. Varmer Bollop I don't owe no grudge to:
Varmer Blaize I do. And I shud like to stick a Lucifer in his rick
some dry windy night." Speed-the-Plough screwed up an eye
villainously. "He wants hittin' in the wind,--jest where the pocket
is, master, do Varmer Blaize, and he'll cry out 'O Lor'!' Varmer
Blaize will. You won't get the better o' Varmer Blaize by no means,
as I makes out, if ye doan't hit into him jest there."

The tinker sent a rapid succession of white clouds from his mouth,
and said that would be taking the devil's side of a bad case.
Speed-the-Plough observed energetically that, if Farmer Blaize was
on the other, he should be on that side.

There was a young gentleman close by, who thought with him. The hope
of Raynham had lent a careless half-compelled attention to the
foregoing dialogue, wherein a common labourer and a travelling
tinker had propounded and discussed one of the most ancient theories
of transmundane dominion and influence on mundane affairs. He now
started to his feet, and came tearing through the briar hedge,
calling out for one of them to direct them the nearest road to
Bursley. The tinker was kindling preparations for his tea, under the
tawny umbrella. A loaf was set forth, on which Ripton's eyes, stuck
in the hedge, fastened ravenously. Speed-the-Plough volunteered
information that Bursley was a good three mile from where they
stood, and a good eight mile from Lobourne.

"I'll give you half-a-crown for that loaf, my good fellow," said
Richard to the tinker.

"It's a bargain," quoth the tinker, "eh, missus?"

His cat replied by humping her back at the dog.

The half-crown was tossed down, and Ripton, who had just succeeded
in freeing his limbs from the briar, prickly as a hedgehog, collared
the loaf.

"Those young squires be sharp-set, and no mistake," said the tinker
to his companion. "Come! we'll to Bursley after 'em, and talk it out
over a pot o' beer." Speed-the-Plough was nothing loath, and in a
short time they were following the two lads on the road to Bursley,
while a horizontal blaze shot across the autumn land from the
Western edge of the rain-cloud.




CHAPTER IV

ARSON


Search for the missing boys had been made everywhere over Raynham,
and Sir Austin was in grievous discontent. None had seen them save
Austin Wentworth and Mr. Morton. The baronet sat construing their
account of the flight of the lads when they were hailed, and
resolved it into an act of rebellion on the part of his son. At
dinner he drank the young heir's health in ominous silence. Adrian
Harley stood up in his place to propose the health. His speech was a
fine piece of rhetoric. He warmed in it till, after the Ciceronic
model, inanimate objects were personified, and Richard's
table-napkin and vacant chair were invoked to follow the steps of a
peerless father, and uphold with his dignity the honour of the
Feverels. Austin Wentworth, whom a soldier's death compelled to take
his father's place in support of the toast, was tame after such
magniloquence. But the reply, the thanks which young Richard should
have delivered in person were not forthcoming. Adrian's oratory had
given but a momentary life to napkin and chair. The company of
honoured friends, and aunts, and uncles, and remotest cousins, were
glad to disperse and seek amusement in music and tea. Sir Austin did
his utmost to be hospitably cheerful, and requested them to dance.
If he had desired them to laugh he would have been obeyed, and in as
hearty a manner.

"How triste!" said Mrs. Doria Forey to Lobourne's curate, as that
most enamoured automaton went through his paces beside her with
professional stiffness.

"One who does not suffer can hardly assent," the curate answered,
basking in her beams.

"Ah, you are good!" exclaimed the lady. "Look at my Clare. She will
not dance on her cousin's birthday with any one but him. What are we
to do to enliven these people?"

"Alas, madam! you cannot do for all what you do for one," the
curate sighed, and wherever she wandered in discourse, drew her back
with silken strings to gaze on his enamoured soul.

He was the only gratified stranger present. The others had designs
on the young heir. Lady Attenbury of Longford House had brought her
highly-polished specimen of marketware, the Lady Juliana Jaye, for a
first introduction to him, thinking he had arrived at an age to
estimate and pine for her black eyes and pretty pert mouth. The Lady
Juliana had to pair off with a dapper Papworth, and her mama was
subjected to the gallantries of Sir Miles, who talked land and
steam-engines to her till she was sick, and had to be impertinent in
self-defence. Lady Blandish, the delightful widow, sat apart with
Adrian, and enjoyed his sarcasms on the company. By ten at night the
poor show ended, and the rooms were dark, dark as the prognostics
multitudinously hinted by the disappointed and chilled guests
concerning the probable future of the hope of Raynham. Little Clare
kissed her mama, curtsied to the lingering curate, and went to bed
like a very good girl. Immediately the maid had departed, little
Clare deliberately exchanged night attire for that of day. She was
noted as an obedient child. Her light was always allowed to burn in
her room for half-an-hour, to counteract her fears of the dark. She
took the light, and stole on tiptoe to Richard's room. No Richard
was there. She peeped in further and further. A trifling agitation
of the curtains shot her back through the door and along the passage
to her own bedchamber with extreme expedition. She was not much
alarmed, but feeling guilty she was on her guard. In a short time
she was prowling about the passages again. Richard had slighted and
offended the little lady, and was to be asked whether he did not
repent such conduct toward his cousin; not to be asked whether he
had forgotten to receive his birthday kiss from her; for, if he did
not choose to remember that, Miss Clare would never remind him of
it, and to-night should be his last chance of a reconciliation. Thus
she meditated, sitting on a stair, and presently heard Richard's
voice below in the hall, shouting for supper.

"Master Richard has returned," old Benson the butler tolled out
intelligence to Sir Austin.

"Well?" said the baronet.

"He complains of being hungry," the butler hesitated, with a look of
solemn disgust.

"Let him eat."

Heavy Benson hesitated still more as he announced that the boy had
called for wine. It was an unprecedented thing. Sir Austin's brows
were portending an arch, but Adrian suggested that he wanted
possibly to drink his birthday, and claret was conceded.

The boys were in the vortex of a partridge-pie when Adrian strolled
in to them. They had now changed characters. Richard was uproarious.
He drank a health with every glass; his cheeks were flushed and his
eyes brilliant. Ripton looked very much like a rogue on the tremble
of detection, but his honest hunger and the partridge-pie shielded
him awhile from Adrian's scrutinizing glance. Adrian saw there was
matter for study, if it were only on Master Ripton's betraying nose,
and sat down to hear and mark.

"Good sport, gentlemen, I trust to hear?" he began his quiet banter,
and provoked a loud peal of laughter from Richard.

"Ha, ha! I say, Rip: 'Havin' good sport, gentlemen, are ye?' You
remember the farmer! Your health, parson! We haven't had our sport
yet. We're going to have some first-rate sport. Oh, well! we haven't
much show of birds. We shot for pleasure, and returned them to the
proprietors. You're fond of game, parson! Ripton is a dead shot in
what Cousin Austin calls the Kingdom of 'would-have-done' and
'might-have-been.' Up went the birds, and cries Rip, 'I've forgotten
to load!' Oh, ho!--Rip! some more claret--Do just leave that nose of
yours alone.--Your health, Ripton Thompson! The birds hadn't the
decency to wait for him, and so, parson, it's their fault, and not
Rip's, you haven't a dozen brace at your feet. What have you been
doing at home, Cousin Rady?"

"Playing Hamlet, in the absence of the Prince of Denmark. The day
without you, my dear boy, must be dull, you know."

    "'He speaks: can I trust what he says is sincere?
    There's an edge to his smile that cuts much like a sneer.'

Sandoe's poems! You know the couplet, Mr. Rady. Why shouldn't I
quote Sandoe? You know you like him, Rady. But, if you've missed me,
I'm sorry. Rip and I have had a beautiful day. We've made new
acquaintances. We've seen the world. I'm the monkey that has seen
the world, and I'm going to tell you all about it. First, there's a
gentleman who takes a rifle for a fowling-piece. Next, there's a
farmer who warns everybody, gentleman and beggar, off his premises.
Next, there's a tinker and a ploughman, who think that God is always
fighting with the devil which shall command the kingdoms of the
earth. The tinker's for God, and the ploughman"----

"I'll drink your health, Ricky," said Adrian, interrupting.

"Oh, I forgot, parson;--I mean no harm, Adrian. I'm only telling
what I've heard."

"No harm, my dear boy," returned Adrian. "I'm perfectly aware that
Zoroaster is not dead. You have been listening to a common creed.
Drink the Fire-worshippers, if you will."

"Here's to Zoroaster, then!" cried Richard. "I say, Rippy! we'll
drink the Fire-worshippers to-night, won't we?"

A fearful conspiratorial frown, that would not have disgraced Guido
Fawkes, was darted back from the plastic features of Master Ripton.

Richard gave his lungs loud play.

"Why, what did you say about Blaizes, Rippy? Didn't you say it was
fun?"

Another hideous and silencing frown was Ripton's answer. Adrian
watched the innocent youths, and knew that there was talking under
the table. "See," thought he, "this boy has tasted his first scraggy
morsel of life to-day, and already he talks like an old stager, and
has, if I mistake not, been acting too. My respected chief," he
apostrophized Sir Austin, "combustibles are only the more dangerous
for compression. This boy will be ravenous for Earth when he is let
loose, and very soon make his share of it look as foolish as yonder
game-pie!"--a prophecy Adrian kept to himself.

Uncle Algernon shambled in to see his nephew before the supper was
finished, and his more genial presence brought out a little of the
plot.

"Look here, uncle!" said Richard. "Would you let a churlish old
brute of a farmer strike you without making him suffer for it?"

"I fancy I should return the compliment, my lad," replied his uncle.

"Of course you would! So would I. And he shall suffer for it." The
boy looked savage, and his uncle patted him down.

"I've boxed his son; I'll box him," said Richard, shouting for more
wine.

"What, boy! Is it old Blaize has been putting you up?"

"Never mind, uncle!" The boy nodded mysteriously.

Look there! Adrian read on Ripton's face, he says "never mind," and
lets it out!

"Did we beat to-day, uncle?"

"Yes, boy; and we'd beat them any day they bowl fair. I'd beat them
on one leg. There's only Natkins and Featherdene among them worth a
farthing."

"We beat!" cries Richard. "Then we'll have some more wine, and drink
their healths."

The bell was rung; wine ordered. Presently comes in heavy Benson, to
say supplies are cut off. One bottle, and no more. The Captain
whistled; Adrian shrugged.

The bottle, however, was procured by Adrian subsequently. He liked
studying intoxicated urchins.

One subject was at Richard's heart, about which he was reserved in
the midst of his riot. Too proud to inquire how his father had taken
his absence, he burned to hear whether he was in disgrace. He led to
it repeatedly, and it was constantly evaded by Algernon and Adrian.
At last, when the boy declared a desire to wish his father
good-night, Adrian had to tell him that he was to go straight to bed
from the supper-table. Young Richard's face fell at that, and his
gaiety forsook him. He marched to his room without another word.

Adrian gave Sir Austin an able version of his son's behaviour and
adventures; dwelling upon this sudden taciturnity when he heard of
his father's resolution not to see him. The wise youth saw that his
chief was mollified behind his moveless mask, and went to bed, and
Horace, leaving Sir Austin in his study. Long hours the baronet sat
alone. The house had not its usual influx of Feverels that day.
Austin Wentworth was staying at Poer Hall, and had only come over
for an hour. At midnight the house breathed sleep. Sir Austin put on
his cloak and cap, and took the lamp to make his rounds. He
apprehended nothing special, but with a mind never at rest he
constituted himself the sentinel of Raynham. He passed the chamber
where the Great-Aunt Grantley lay, who was to swell Richard's
fortune, and so perform her chief business on earth. By her door he
murmured, "Good creature! you sleep with a sense of duty done," and
paced on, reflecting, "She has not made money a demon of discord,"
and blessed her. He had his thoughts at Hippias's somnolent door,
and to them the world might have subscribed.

A monomaniac at large, watching over sane people in slumber! thinks
Adrian Harley, as he hears Sir Austin's footfall, and truly that was
a strange object to see.--Where is the fortress that has not one
weak gate? where the man who is sound at each particular angle? Ay,
meditates the recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every
mother's son? Favourable circumstances--good air, good company, two
or three good rules rigidly adhered to--keep the world out of
Bedlam. But, let the world fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam the
safest abode for it?

Sir Austin ascended the stairs, and bent his steps leisurely toward
the chamber where his son was lying in the left wing of the Abbey.
At the end of the gallery which led to it he discovered a dim light.
Doubting it an illusion, Sir Austin accelerated his pace. This wing
had aforetime a bad character. Notwithstanding what years had done
to polish it into fair repute, the Raynham kitchen stuck to
tradition, and preserved certain stories of ghosts seen there, that
effectually blackened it in the susceptible minds of new housemaids
and under-cooks, whose fears would not allow the sinner to wash his
sins. Sir Austin had heard of the tales circulated by his domestics
underground. He cherished his own belief, but discouraged theirs,
and it was treason at Raynham to be caught traducing the left wing.
As the baronet advanced, the fact of a light burning was clear to
him. A slight descent brought him into the passage, and he beheld a
poor human candle standing outside his son's chamber. At the same
moment a door closed hastily. He entered Richard's room. The boy was
absent. The bed was unpressed: no clothes about: nothing to show
that he had been there that night. Sir Austin felt vaguely
apprehensive. Has he gone to my room to await me? thought the
father's heart. Something like a tear quivered in his arid eyes as
he meditated and hoped this might be so. His own sleeping-room faced
that of his son. He strode to it with a quick heart. It was empty.
Alarm dislodged anger from his jealous heart, and dread of evil put
a thousand questions to him that were answered in air. After pacing
up and down his room he determined to go and ask the boy Thompson,
as he called Ripton, what was known to him.

The chamber assigned to Master Ripton Thompson was at the northern
extremity of the passage, and overlooked Lobourne and the valley to
the West. The bed stood between the window and the door. Sir Austin
found the door ajar, and the interior dark. To his surprise, the boy
Thompson's couch, as revealed by the rays of his lamp, was likewise
vacant. He was turning back when he fancied he heard the sibilation
of a whispering in the room. Sir Austin cloaked the lamp and trod
silently toward the window. The heads of his son Richard and the boy
Thompson were seen crouched against the glass, holding excited
converse together. Sir Austin listened, but he listened to a
language of which he possessed not the key. Their talk was of fire,
and of delay: of expected agrarian astonishment: of a farmer's huge
wrath: of violence exercised upon gentlemen, and of vengeance: talk
that the boys jerked out by fits, and that came as broken links of a
chain impossible to connect. But they awoke curiosity. The baronet
condescended to play the spy upon his son.

Over Lobourne and the valley lay black night and innumerable stars.

"How jolly I feel!" exclaimed Ripton, inspired by claret; and then,
after a luxurious pause--"I think that fellow has pocketed his
guinea, and cut his lucky."

Richard allowed a long minute to pass, during which the baronet
waited anxiously for his voice, hardly recognizing it when he heard
its altered tones.

"If he has, I'll go; and I'll do it myself."

"You would?" returned Master Ripton. "Well, I'm hanged!--I say, if
you went to school, wouldn't you get into rows! Perhaps he hasn't
found the place where the box was stuck in. I think he funks it. I
almost wish you hadn't done it, upon my honour--eh? Look there! what
was that? That looked like something.--I say! do you think we shall
ever be found out?"

Master Ripton intoned this abrupt interrogation very seriously.

"I don't think about it," said Richard, all his faculties bent on
signs from Lobourne.

"Well, but," Ripton persisted, "suppose we are found out?"

"If we are, I must pay for it."

Sir Austin breathed the better for this reply. He was beginning to
gather a clue to the dialogue. His son was engaged in a plot, and
was, moreover, the leader of the plot. He listened for further
enlightenment.

"What was the fellow's name?" inquired Ripton.

His companion answered, "Tom Bakewell."

"I'll tell you what," continued Ripton. "You let it all clean out to
your cousin and uncle at supper. How capital claret is with
partridge-pie! What a lot I ate!--Didn't you see me frown?"

The young sensualist was in an ecstasy of gratitude to his late
refection, and the slightest word recalled him to it. Richard
answered him--

"Yes; and felt your kick. It doesn't matter. Rady's safe, and uncle
never blabs."

"Well, my plan is to keep it close. You're never safe if you
don't.--I never drank much claret before," Ripton was off again.
"Won't I now, though! claret's my wine. You know, it may come out
any day, and then we're done for," he rather incongruously appended.

Richard only took up the business-thread of his friend's rambling
chatter, and answered--

"You've got nothing to do with it, if we are."

"Haven't I, though! I didn't stick in the box, but I'm an
accomplice, that's clear. Besides," added Ripton, "do you think I
should leave you to bear it all on your shoulders? I ain't that sort
of chap, Ricky, I can tell you."

Sir Austin thought more highly of the boy Thompson. Still it looked
a detestable conspiracy, and the altered manner of his son impressed
him strangely. He was not the boy of yesterday. To Sir Austin it
seemed as if a gulf had suddenly opened between them. The boy had
embarked, and was on the waters of life in his own vessel. It was as
vain to call him back as to attempt to erase what Time has written
with the Judgment Blood! This child, for whom he had prayed nightly
in such a fervour and humbleness to God, the dangers were about him,
the temptations thick on him, and the devil on board piloting. If a
day had done so much, what would years do? Were prayers and all the
watchfulness he had expended of no avail?

A sensation of infinite melancholy overcame the poor gentleman--a
thought that he was fighting with a fate in this beloved boy.

He was half disposed to arrest the two conspirators on the spot, and
make them confess, and absolve themselves; but it seemed to him
better to keep an unseen eye over his son: Sir Austin's old system
prevailed.

Adrian characterized this system well, in saying that Sir Austin
wished to be Providence to his son.

If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might
almost impersonate Providence to another. Alas! love, divine as it
is, can do no more than lighten the house it inhabits--must take its
shape, sometimes intensify its narrowness--can spiritualize, but not
expel, the old life-long lodgers above-stairs and below.

Sir Austin decided to continue quiescent.

The valley still lay black beneath the large autumnal stars, and the
exclamations of the boys were becoming fevered and impatient.
By-and-by one insisted that he had seen a twinkle. The direction he
gave was out of their anticipations. Again the twinkle was
announced. Both boys started to their feet. It was a twinkle in the
right direction now.

"He's done it!" cried Richard, in great heat. "Now you may say old
Blaize'll soon be old Blazes, Rip. I hope he's asleep."

"I'm sure he's snoring!--Look there! He's alight fast enough. He's
dry. He'll burn.--I say," Ripton re-assumed the serious intonation,
"do you think they'll ever suspect us?"

"What if they do? We must brunt it."

"Of course we will. But, I say! I wish you hadn't given them the
scent, though. I like to look innocent. I can't when I know people
suspect me. Lord! look there! Isn't it just beginning to flare up!"

The farmer's grounds were indeed gradually standing out in sombre
shadows.

"I'll fetch my telescope," said Richard. Ripton, somehow not liking
to be left alone, caught hold of him.

"No; don't go and lose the best of it. Here, I'll throw open the
window, and we can see."

The window was flung open, and the boys instantly stretched half
their bodies out of it; Ripton appearing to devour the rising flames
with his mouth: Richard with his eyes.

Opaque and statuesque stood the figure of the baronet behind them.
The wind was low. Dense masses of smoke hung amid the darting snakes
of fire, and a red malign light was on the neighbouring leafage. No
figures could be seen. Apparently the flames had nothing to contend
against, for they were making terrible strides into the darkness.

"Oh!" shouted Richard, overcome by excitement, "if I had my
telescope! We must have it! Let me go and fetch it! I will!"

The boys struggled together, and Sir Austin stepped back. As he did
so, a cry was heard in the passage. He hurried out, closed the
chamber, and came upon little Clare lying senseless along the floor.




CHAPTER V

ADRIAN PLIES HIS HOOK


In the morning that followed this night, great gossip was
interchanged between Raynham and Lobourne. The village told how
Farmer Blaize, of Belthorpe Farm, had his rick feloniously set fire
to; his stables had caught fire, himself had been all but roasted
alive in the attempt to rescue his cattle, of which numbers had
perished in the flames. Raynham counterbalanced arson with an
authentic ghost seen by Miss Clare in the left wing of the
Abbey--the ghost of a lady, dressed in deep mourning, a scar on her
forehead, and a bloody handkerchief at her breast, frightful to
behold! and no wonder the child was frightened out of her wits, and
lay in a desperate State awaiting the arrival of the London doctors.
It was added that the servants had all threatened to leave in a
body, and that Sir Austin to appease them had promised to pull down
the entire left wing, like a gentleman; for no decent creature, said
Lobourne, could consent to live in a haunted house.

Rumour for the nonce had a stronger spice of truth than usual. Poor
little Clare lay ill, and the calamity that had befallen Farmer
Blaize, as regards his rick, was not much exaggerated. Sir Austin
caused an account of it to be given him at breakfast, and appeared
so scrupulously anxious to hear the exact extent of injury sustained
by the farmer that heavy Benson went down to inspect the scene. Mr.
Benson returned, and, acting under Adrian's malicious advice, framed
a formal report of the catastrophe, in which the farmer's breeches
figured, and certain cooling applications to a part of the farmer's
person. Sir Austin perused it without a smile. He took occasion to
have it read out before the two boys, who listened very demurely, as
to an ordinary newspaper incident; only when the report
particularized the garments damaged, and the unwonted distressing
position Farmer Blaize was reduced to in his bed, an indecorous fit
of sneezing laid hold of Master Ripton Thompson, and Richard bit his
lip and burst into loud laughter, Ripton joining him, lost to
consequences.

"I trust you feel for this poor man," said Sir Austin to his son,
somewhat sternly. He saw no sign of feeling.

It was a difficult task for Sir Austin to keep his old countenance
toward the hope of Raynham, knowing him the accomplice-incendiary,
and believing the deed to have been unprovoked and wanton. But he
must do so, he knew, to let the boy have a fair trial against
himself. Be it said, moreover, that the baronet's possession of his
son's secret flattered him. It allowed him to act, and in a measure
to feel, like Providence; enabled him to observe and provide for the
movements of creatures in the dark. He therefore treated the boy as
he commonly did, and Richard saw no change in his father to make him
think he was suspected.

The youngster's game was not so easy against Adrian. Adrian did not
shoot or fish. Voluntarily he did nothing to work off the
destructive nervous fluid, or whatever it may be, which is in man's
nature; so that two culprit boys once in his power were not likely
to taste the gentle hand of mercy, and Richard and Ripton paid for
many a trout and partridge spared. At every minute of the day Ripton
was thrown into sweats of suspicion that discovery was imminent, by
some stray remark or message from Adrian. He was as a fish with the
hook in his gills, mysteriously caught without having nibbled; and
dive into what depths he would he was sensible of a summoning force
that compelled him perpetually towards the gasping surface, which he
seemed inevitably approaching when the dinner-bell sounded. There
the talk was all of Farmer Blaize. If it dropped, Adrian revived it,
and his caressing way with Ripton was just such as a keen sportsman
feels toward the creature that has owned his skill, and is making
its appearance for the world to acknowledge the same. Sir Austin saw
the manoeuvres, and admired Adrian's shrewdness. But he had to
check the young natural lawyer, for the effect of so much masked
examination upon Richard was growing baneful. This fish also felt
the hook in his gills, but this fish was more of a pike, and lay in
different waters, where there were old stumps and black roots to
wind about, and defy alike strong pulling and delicate handling. In
other words, Richard showed symptoms of a disposition to take refuge
in lies.

"You know the grounds, my dear boy," Adrian observed to him. "Tell
me; do you think it easy to get to the rick unperceived? I hear they
suspect one of the farmer's turned-off hands."

"I tell you I don't know the grounds," Richard sullenly replied.

"Not?" Adrian counterfeited courteous astonishment. "I thought Mr.
Thompson said you were over there yesterday?"

Ripton, glad to speak a truth, hurriedly assured Adrian that it was
not he had said so.

"Not? You had good sport, gentlemen, hadn't you?"

"Oh, yes!" mumbled the wretched victims, reddening as they
remembered, in Adrian's slightly drawled rusticity of tone, Farmer
Blaize's first address to them.

"I suppose you were among the Fire-worshippers last night, too?"
persisted Adrian. "In some countries, I hear, they manage their best
sport at night-time, and beat up for game with torches. It must be a
fine sight. After all, the country would be dull if we hadn't a rip
here and there to treat us to a little conflagration."

"A rip!" laughed Richard, to his friend's disgust and alarm at his
daring. "You don't mean this Rip, do you?"

"Mr. Thompson fire a rick? I should as soon suspect you, my dear
boy.--You are aware, young gentlemen, that it is rather a serious
thing--eh? In this country, you know, the landlord has always been
the pet of the Laws. By the way," Adrian continued, as if diverging
to another topic, "you met two gentlemen of the road in your
explorations yesterday, Magians. Now, if I were a magistrate of the
county, like Sir Miles Papworth, my suspicions would light upon
those gentlemen. A tinker and a ploughman, I think you said, Mr.
Thompson. Not? Well, say two ploughmen."

"More likely two tinkers," said Richard.

"Oh! if you wish to exclude the ploughman--was he out of employ?"

Ripton, with Adrian's eyes inveterately fixed on him, stammered an
affirmative.

"The tinker, or the ploughman?"

"The ploughm--" Ingenuous Ripton looking about, as if to aid himself
whenever he was able to speak the truth, beheld Richard's face
blackening at him, and swallowed back half the word.

"The ploughman!" Adrian took him up cheerily. "Then we have here a
ploughman out of employ. Given a ploughman out of employ, and a rick
burnt. The burning of a rick is an act of vengeance, and a ploughman
out of employ is a vengeful animal. The rick and the ploughman are
advancing to a juxtaposition. Motive being established, we have only
to prove their proximity at a certain hour, and our ploughman
voyages beyond seas."

"Is it transportation for rick-burning?" inquired Ripton aghast.

Adrian spoke solemnly: "They shave your head. You are manacled. Your
diet is sour bread and cheese-parings. You work in strings of
twenties and thirties. ARSON is branded on your backs in an enormous
A. Theological works are the sole literary recreation of the
well-conducted and deserving. Consider the fate of this poor fellow,
and what an act of vengeance brings him to! Do you know his name?"

"How should I know his name?" said Richard, with an assumption of
innocence painful to see.

Sir Austin remarked that no doubt it would soon be known, and Adrian
perceived that he was to quiet his line, marvelling a little at the
baronet's blindness to what was so clear. He would not tell, for
that would ruin his future influence with Richard; still he wanted
some present credit for his discernment and devotion. The boys got
away from dinner, and, after deep consultation, agreed upon a course
of conduct, which was to commiserate Farmer Blaize loudly, and make
themselves look as much like the public as it was possible for two
young malefactors to look, one of whom already felt Adrian's
enormous A devouring his back with the fierceness of the Promethean
eagle, and isolating him for ever from mankind. Adrian relished
their novel tactics sharply, and led them to lengths of lamentation
for Farmer Blaize. Do what they might, the hook was in their gills.
The farmer's whip had reduced them to bodily contortions: these were
decorous compared with the spiritual writhings they had to perform
under Adrian's manipulation. Ripton was fast becoming a coward, and
Richard a liar, when next morning Austin Wentworth came over from
Poer Hall bringing news that one Mr. Thomas Bakewell, yeoman, had
been arrested on suspicion of the crime of Arson and lodged in jail,
awaiting the magisterial pleasure of Sir Miles Papworth. Austin's
eye rested on Richard as he spoke these terrible tidings. The hope
of Raynham returned his look, perfectly calm, and had, moreover,
the presence of mind not to look at Ripton.




CHAPTER VI

JUVENILE STRATAGEMS


As soon as they could escape, the boys got away together into an
obscure corner of the park, and there took counsel of their
extremity.

"Whatever shall we do now?" asked Ripton of his leader.

Scorpion girt with fire was never in a more terrible prison-house
than poor Ripton, around whom the raging element he had assisted to
create seemed to be drawing momentary narrower circles.

"There's only one chance," said Richard, coming to a dead halt, and
folding his arms resolutely.

His comrade inquired with the utmost eagerness what that chance
might be.

Richard fixed his eyes on a flint, and replied: "We must rescue that
fellow from jail."

Ripton gazed at his leader, and fell back with astonishment. "My
dear Ricky! but how are we to do it?"

Richard, still perusing his flint, replied: "We must manage to get a
file in to him and a rope. It can be done, I tell you. I don't care
what I pay. I don't care what I do. He must be got out."

"Bother that old Blaize!" exclaimed Ripton, taking off his cap to
wipe his frenzied forehead, and brought down his friend's reproof.

"Never mind old Blaize now. Talk about letting it out! Look at you.
I'm ashamed of you. You talk about Robin Hood and King Richard! Why,
you haven't an atom of courage. Why, you let it out every second of
the day. Whenever Rady begins speaking you start; I can see the
perspiration rolling down you. Are you afraid?--And then you
contradict yourself. You never keep to one story. Now, follow me. We
must risk everything to get him out. Mind that! And keep out of
Adrian's way as much as you can. And keep to one story."

With these sage directions the young leader marched his
companion-culprit down to inspect the jail where Tom Bakewell lay
groaning over the results of the super-mundane conflict, and the
victim of it that he was.

In Lobourne Austin Wentworth had the reputation of the poor man's
friend; a title he earned more largely ere he went to the reward God
alone can give to that supreme virtue. Dame Bakewell, the mother of
Tom, on hearing of her son's arrest, had run to comfort him and
render him what help she could; but this was only sighs and tears,
and, oh deary me! which only perplexed poor Tom, who bade her leave
an unlucky chap to his fate, and not make himself a thundering
villain. Whereat the dame begged him to take heart, and he should
have a true comforter. "And though it's a gentleman that's coming to
you, Tom--for he never refuses a poor body," said Mrs. Bakewell,
"it's a true Christian, Tom! and the Lord knows if the sight of him
mayn't be the saving of you, for he's light to look on, and a sermon
to listen to, he is!"

Tom was not prepossessed by the prospect of a sermon, and looked a
sullen dog enough when Austin entered his cell. He was surprised at
the end of half-an-hour to find himself engaged in man-to-man
conversation with a gentleman and a Christian. When Austin rose to
go, Tom begged permission to shake his hand.

"Take and tell young master up at the Abbey that I an't the chap to
peach. He'll know. He's a young gentleman as'll make any man do as
he wants 'em! He's a mortal wild young gentleman! And I'm a Ass!
That's where 'tis. But I an't a blackguard. Tell him that, sir!"

This was how it came that Austin eyed young Richard seriously while
he told the news at Raynham. The boy was shy of Austin more than of
Adrian. Why, he did not know; but he made it a hard task for Austin
to catch him alone, and turned sulky that instant. Austin was not
clever like Adrian: he seldom divined other people's ideas, and
always went the direct road to his object; so instead of beating
about and setting the boy on the alert at all points, crammed to the
muzzle with lies, he just said, "Tom Bakewell told me to let you
know he does not intend to peach on you," and left him.

Richard repeated the intelligence to Ripton, who cried aloud that
Tom was a brick.

"He shan't suffer for it," said Richard, and pondered on a thicker
rope and sharper file.

"But will your cousin tell?" was Ripton's reflection.

"He!" Richard's lip expressed contempt. "A ploughman refuses to
peach, and you ask if one of our family will?"

Ripton stood for the twentieth time reproved on this point.

The boys had examined the outer walls of the jail, and arrived at
the conclusion that Tom's escape might be managed if Tom had spirit,
and the rope and file could be anyway reached to him. But to do
this, somebody must gain admittance to his cell, and who was to be
taken into their confidence?

"Try your cousin," Ripton suggested, after much debate.

Richard, smiling, wished to know if he meant Adrian.

"No, no!" Ripton hurriedly reassured him. "Austin."

The same idea was knocking at Richard's head.

"Let's get the rope and file first," said he, and to Bursley they
went for those implements to defeat the law, Ripton procuring the
file at one shop and Richard the rope at another, with such masterly
cunning did they lay their measures for the avoidance of every
possible chance of detection. And better to assure this, in a wood
outside Bursley Richard stripped to his shirt and wound the rope
round his body, tasting the tortures of anchorites and penitential
friars, that nothing should be risked to make Tom's escape a
certainty. Sir Austin saw the marks at night as his son lay asleep,
through the half-opened folds of his bed-gown.

It was a severe stroke when, after all their stratagems and trouble,
Austin Wentworth refused the office the boys had zealously designed
for him. Time pressed. In a few days poor Tom would have to face the
redoubtable Sir Miles, and get committed, for rumours of
overwhelming evidence to convict him were rife about Lobourne, and
Farmer Blaize's wrath was unappeasable. Again and again young
Richard begged his cousin not to see him disgraced, and to help him
in this extremity. Austin smiled on him.

"My dear Ricky," said he, "there are two ways of getting out of a
scrape: a long way and a short way. When you've tried the roundabout
method, and failed, come to me, and I'll show you the straight
route."

Richard was too entirely bent upon the roundabout method to consider
this advice more than empty words, and only ground his teeth at
Austin's unkind refusal.

He imparted to Ripton, at the eleventh hour, that they must do it
themselves, to which Ripton heavily assented.

On the day preceding poor Tom's doomed appearance before the
magistrate, Dame Bakewell had an interview with Austin, who went to
Raynham immediately, and sought Adrian's counsel upon what was to be
done. Homeric laughter and nothing else could be got out of Adrian
when he heard of the doings of these desperate boys: how they had
entered Dame Bakewell's smallest of retail shops, and purchased tea,
sugar, candles, and comfits of every description, till the shop was
clear of customers: how they had then hurried her into her little
back-parlour, where Richard had torn open his shirt and revealed the
coils of rope, and Ripton displayed the point of a file from a
serpentine recess in his jacket: how they had then told the
astonished woman that the rope she saw and the file she saw were
instruments for the liberation of her son; that there existed no
other means on earth to save him, they, the boys, having
unsuccessfully attempted all: how upon that Richard had tried with
the utmost earnestness to persuade her to disrobe and wind the rope
round her own person: and Ripton had aired his eloquence to induce
her to secrete the file: how, when she resolutely objected to the
rope, both boys began backing the file, and in an evil hour, she
feared, said Dame Bakewell, she had rewarded the gracious permission
given her by Sir Miles Papworth to visit her son, by tempting Tom to
file the Law. Though, thanks be to the Lord! Dame Bakewell added,
Tom had turned up his nose at the file, and so she had told young
Master Richard, who swore very bad for a young gentleman.

"Boys are like monkeys," remarked Adrian, at the close of his
explosions, "the gravest actors of farcical nonsense that the world
possesses. May I never be where there are no boys! A couple of boys
left to themselves will furnish richer fun than any troop of trained
comedians. No: no Art arrives at the artlessness of nature in
matters of comedy. You can't simulate the ape. Your antics are dull.
They haven't the charming inconsequence of the natural animal. Look
at these two! Think of the shifts they are put to all day long! They
know I know all about it, and yet their serenity of innocence is all
but unruffled in my presence. You're sorry to think about the end of
the business, Austin? So am I! I dread the idea of the curtain going
down. Besides, it will do Ricky a world of good. A practical lesson
is the best lesson."

"Sinks deepest," said Austin, "but whether he learns good or evil
from it is the question at stake."

Adrian stretched his length at ease.

"This will be his first nibble at experience, old Time's fruit, hateful
to the palate of youth! for which season only hath it any nourishment!
Experience! You know Coleridge's capital simile?--Mournful you call
it? Well! all wisdom is mournful. 'Tis therefore, coz, that the wise do
love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall
find great poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad
grin before a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because
all's dark at home. The stage is the pastime of great minds. That's
how it comes that the stage is now down. An age of rampant little
minds, my dear Austin! How I hate that cant of yours about an Age of
Work--you, and your Mortons, and your parsons Brawnley, rank radicals
all of you, base materialists! What does Diaper Sandoe sing of your
Age of Work? Listen!

         'An Age of petty tit for tat,
           An Age of busy gabble:
         An age that's like a brewer's vat,
           Fermenting for the rabble!

         'An Age that's chaste in Love, but lax
           To virtuous abuses:
         Whose gentlemen and ladies wax
           Too dainty for their uses.

         'An Age that drives an Iron Horse,
           Of Time and Space defiant;
         Exulting in a Giant's Force,
           And trembling at the Giant.

         'An Age of Quaker hue and cut,
           By Mammon misbegotten;
         See the mad Hamlet mouth and strut!
           And mark the Kings of Cotton!

         'From this unrest, lo, early wreck'd,
           A Future staggers crazy,
         Ophelia of the Ages, deck'd
           With woeful weed and daisy!'"

Murmuring, "Get your parson Brawnley to answer that!" Adrian changed
the resting-place of a leg, and smiled. The AGE was an old
battle-field between him and Austin.

"My parson Brawnley, as you call him, has answered it," said Austin,
"not by hoping his best, which would probably leave the Age to go
mad to your satisfaction, but by doing it. And he has and will
answer your Diaper Sandoe in better verse, as he confutes him in a
better life."

"You don't see Sandoe's depth," Adrian replied. "Consider that
phrase, 'Ophelia of the Ages'! Is not Brawnley, like a dozen other
leading spirits--I think that's your term--just the metaphysical
Hamlet to drive her mad? She, poor maid! asks for marriage and
smiling babes, while my lord lover stands questioning the Infinite,
and rants to the Impalpable."

Austin laughed. "Marriage and smiling babes she would have in
abundance, if Brawnley legislated. Wait till you know him. He will
be over at Poer Hall shortly, and you will see what a Man of the Age
means. But now, pray, consult with me about these boys."

"Oh, those boys!" Adrian tossed a hand. "Are there boys of the Age
as well as men? Not? Then boys are better than men: boys are for all
Ages. What do you think, Austin? They've been studying Latude's
Escape. I found the book open in Ricky's room, on the top of
Jonathan Wild. Jonathan preserved the secrets of his profession, and
taught them nothing. So they're going to make a Latude of Mr. Tom
Bakewell. He's to be Bastille Bakewell, whether he will or no. Let
them. Let the wild colt run free! We can't help them. We can only
look on. We should spoil the play."

Adrian always made a point of feeding the fretful beast Impatience
with pleasantries--a not congenial diet; and Austin, the most
patient of human beings, began to lose his self-control.

"You talk as if Time belonged to you, Adrian. We have but a few
hours left us. Work first, and joke afterwards. The boy's fate is
being decided now."

"So is everybody's, my dear Austin!" yawned the epicurean.

"Yes, but this boy is at present under our guardianship--under yours
especially."

"Not yet! not yet!" Adrian interjected languidly. "No getting into
scrapes when I have him. The leash, young hound! the collar, young
colt! I'm perfectly irresponsible at present."

"You may have something different to deal with when you are
responsible, if you think that."

"I take my young prince as I find him, coz: a Julian, or a
Caracalla: a Constantine, or a Nero. Then, if he will play the
fiddle to a conflagration, he shall play it well: if he must be a
disputatious apostate, at any rate he shall understand logic and
men, and have the habit of saying his prayers."

"Then you leave me to act alone?" said Austin, rising.

"Without a single curb!" Adrian gesticulated an acquiesced
withdrawal. "I'm sure you would not, still more certain you cannot,
do harm. And be mindful of my prophetic words: Whatever's done, old
Blaize will have to be bought off. There's the affair settled at
once. I suppose I must go to the chief to-night and settle it
myself. We can't see this poor devil condemned, though it's nonsense
to talk of a boy being the prime instigator."

Austin cast an eye at the complacent languor of the wise youth, his
cousin, and the little that he knew of his fellows told him he might
talk for ever here, and not be comprehended. The wise youth's two
ears were stuffed with his own wisdom. One evil only Adrian dreaded,
it was clear--the action of the law.

As he was moving away, Adrian called out to him, "Stop, Austin!
There! don't be anxious! You invariably take the glum side. I've
done something. Never mind what. If you go down to Belthorpe, be
civil, but not obsequious. You remember the tactics of Scipio
Africanus against the Punic elephants? Well, don't say a word--in
thine ear, coz: I've turned Master Blaize's elephants. If they
charge, 'twill be a feint, and back to the destruction of his
serried ranks! You understand. Not? Well, 'tis as well. Only, let
none say that I sleep. If I must see him to-night, I go down knowing
he has not got us in his power." The wise youth yawned, and
stretched out a hand for any book that might be within his reach.
Austin left him to look about the grounds for Richard.




CHAPTER VII

DAPHNE'S BOWER


A little laurel-shaded temple of white marble looked out on the
river from a knoll bordering the Raynham beechwoods, and was dubbed
by Adrian Daphne's Bower. To this spot Richard had retired, and
there Austin found him with his head buried in his hands, a picture
of desperation, whose last shift has been defeated. He allowed
Austin to greet him and sit by him without lifting his head. Perhaps
his eyes were not presentable.

"Where's your friend?" Austin began.

"Gone!" was the answer, sounding cavernous from behind hair and
fingers. An explanation presently followed, that a summons had come
for him in the morning from Mr. Thompson; and that Mr. Ripton had
departed against his will.

In fact, Ripton had protested that he would defy his parent and
remain by his friend in the hour of adversity and at the post of
danger. Sir Austin signified his opinion that a boy should obey his
parent, by giving orders to Benson for Ripton's box to be packed and
ready before noon; and Ripton's alacrity in taking the baronet's
view of filial duty was as little feigned as his offer to Richard
to throw filial duty to the winds. He rejoiced that the Fates had
agreed to remove him from the very hot neighbourhood of Lobourne,
while he grieved, like an honest lad, to see his comrade left to
face calamity alone. The boys parted amicably, as they could hardly
fail to do, when Ripton had sworn fealty to the Feverels with a
warmth that made him declare himself bond, and due to appear at any
stated hour and at any stated place to fight all the farmers in
England, on a mandate from the heir of the house.

"So you're left alone," said Austin, contemplating the boy's shapely
head. "I'm glad of it. We never know what's in us till we stand by
ourselves."

There appeared to be no answer forthcoming. Vanity, however, replied
at last, "He wasn't much support."

"Remember his good points now he's gone, Ricky."

"Oh! he was staunch," the boy grumbled.

"And a staunch friend is not always to be found. Now, have you tried
your own way of rectifying this business, Ricky?"

"I have done everything."

"And failed!"

There was a pause, and then the deep-toned evasion--

"Tom Bakewell's a coward!"

"I suppose, poor fellow," said Austin, in his kind way, "he doesn't
want to get into a deeper mess. I don't think he's a coward."

"He is a coward," cried Richard. "Do you think if I had a file I
would stay in prison? I'd be out the first night! And he might have
had the rope, too--a rope thick enough for a couple of men his size
and weight. Ripton and I and Ned Markham swung on it for an hour,
and it didn't give way. He's a coward, and deserves his fate. I've
no compassion for a coward."

"Nor I much," said Austin.

Richard had raised his head in the heat of his denunciation of poor
Tom. He would have hidden it had he known the thought in Austin's
clear eyes while he faced them.

"I never met a coward myself," Austin continued. "I have heard of
one or two. One let an innocent man die for him."

"How base!" exclaimed the boy.

"Yes, it was bad," Austin acquiesced.

"Bad!" Richard scorned the poor contempt. "How I would have spurned
him! He was a coward!"

"I believe he pleaded the feelings of his family in his excuse, and
tried every means to get the man off. I have read also in the
confessions of a celebrated philosopher, that in his youth he
committed some act of pilfering, and accused a young servant-girl of
his own theft, who was condemned and dismissed for it, pardoning her
guilty accuser."

"What a coward!" shouted Richard. "And he confessed it publicly?"

"You may read it yourself."

"He actually wrote it down, and printed it?"

"You have the book in your father's library. Would you have done so
much?"

Richard faltered. No! he admitted that he never could have told
people.

"Then who is to call that man a coward?" said Austin. "He expiated
his cowardice as all who give way in moments of weakness, and are
not cowards, must do. The coward chooses to think 'God does not see.
I shall escape.' He who is not a coward, and has succumbed, knows
that God has seen all, and it is not so hard a task for him to make
his heart bare to the world. Worse, I should fancy it, to know
myself an impostor when men praised me."

Young Richard's eyes were wandering on Austin's gravely cheerful
face. A keen intentness suddenly fixed them, and he dropped his
head.

"So I think you're wrong, Ricky, in calling this poor Tom a coward
because he refuses to try your means of escape," Austin resumed. "A
coward hardly objects to drag in his accomplice. And, where the
person involved belongs to a great family, it seems to me that for a
poor plough-lad to volunteer not to do so speaks him anything but a
coward."

Richard was dumb. Altogether to surrender his rope and file was a
fearful sacrifice, after all the time, trepidation, and study he had
spent on those two saving instruments. If he avowed Tom's manly
behaviour, Richard Feverel was in a totally new position. Whereas,
by keeping Tom a coward, Richard Feverel was the injured one, and
to seem injured is always a luxury; sometimes a necessity, whether
among boys or men.

In Austin the Magian conflict would not have lasted long. He had but
a blind notion of the fierceness with which it raged in young
Richard. Happily for the boy, Austin was not a preacher. A single
instance, a cant phrase, a fatherly manner, might have wrecked him,
by arousing ancient or latent opposition. The born preacher we feel
instinctively to be our foe. He may do some good to the wretches
that have been struck down and lie gasping on the battlefield: he
rouses antagonism in the strong. Richard's nature, left to itself,
wanted little more than an indication of the proper track, and when
he said, "Tell me what I can do, Austin?" he had fought the best
half of the battle. His voice was subdued. Austin put his hand on
the boy's shoulder.

"You must go down to Farmer Blaize."

"Well!" said Richard, sullenly divining the deed of penance.

"You'll know what to say to him when you're there."

The boy bit his lip and frowned. "Ask a favour of that big brute,
Austin? I can't!"

"Just tell him the whole case, and that you don't intend to stand by
and let the poor fellow suffer without a friend to help him out of
his scrape."

"But, Austin," the boy pleaded, "I shall have to ask him to help off
Tom Bakewell! How can I ask him, when I hate him?"

Austin bade him go, and think nothing of the consequences till he
got there.

Richard groaned in soul.

"You've no pride, Austin."

"Perhaps not."

"You don't know what it is to ask a favour of a brute you hate."

Richard stuck to that view of the case, and stuck to it the faster
the more imperatively the urgency of a movement dawned upon him.

"Why," continued the boy, "I shall hardly be able to keep my fists
off him!"

"Surely you've punished him enough, boy!" said Austin.

"He struck me!" Richard's lip quivered. "He dared not come at me
with his hands. He struck me with a whip. He'll be telling everybody
that he horsewhipped me, and that I went down and begged his pardon.
Begged his pardon! A Feverel beg his pardon! Oh, if I had my will!"

"The man earns his bread, Ricky. You poached on his grounds. He
turned you off, and you fired his rick."

"And I'll pay him for his loss. And I won't do any more."

"Because you won't ask a favour of him?"

"No! I will not ask a favour of him."

Austin looked at the boy steadily. "You prefer to receive a favour
from poor Tom Bakewell?"

At Austin's enunciation of this obverse view of the matter Richard
raised his brow. Dimly a new light broke in upon him. "Favour from
Tom Bakewell, the ploughman? How do you mean, Austin?"

"To save yourself an unpleasantness you permit a country lad to
sacrifice himself for you? I confess I should not have so much
pride."

"Pride!" shouted Richard, stung by the taunt, and set his sight hard
at the blue ridges of the hills.

Not knowing for the moment what else to do, Austin drew a picture of
Tom in prison, and repeated Tom's volunteer statement. The picture,
though his intentions were far from designing it so, had to Richard,
whose perception of humour was infinitely keener, a horrible
chaw-bacon smack about it. Visions of a grinning lout, open from ear
to ear, unkempt, coarse, splay-footed, rose before him and afflicted
him with the strangest sensations of disgust and comicality, mixed
up with pity and remorse--a sort of twisted pathos. There lay Tom;
hob-nail Tom! a bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling animal! and
yet a man; a dear brave human heart notwithstanding; capable of
devotion and unselfishness. The boy's better spirit was touched, and
it kindled his imagination to realize the abject figure of poor
clodpole Tom, and surround it with a halo of mournful light. His
soul was alive. Feelings he had never known streamed in upon him as
from an ethereal casement, an unwonted tenderness, an embracing
humour, a consciousness of some ineffable glory, an irradiation of
the features of humanity. All this was in the bosom of the boy, and
through it all the vision of an actual hob-nail Tom, coarse,
unkempt, open from ear to ear; whose presence was a finger of shame
to him and an oppression of clodpole; yet toward whom he felt just
then a loving-kindness beyond what he felt for any living creature.
He laughed at him, and wept over him. He prized him, while he shrank
from him. It was a genial strife of the angel in him with
constituents less divine; but the angel was uppermost and led the
van--extinguished loathing, humanized laughter, transfigured
pride--pride that would persistently contemplate the corduroys of
gaping Tom, and cry to Richard, in the very tone of Adrian's ironic
voice, "Behold your benefactor!"

Austin sat by the boy, unaware of the sublimer tumult he had
stirred. Little of it was perceptible in Richard's countenance. The
lines of his mouth were slightly drawn; his eyes hard set into the
distance. He remained thus many minutes. Finally he jumped to his
legs, saying, "I'll go at once to old Blaize and tell him."

Austin grasped his hand, and together they issued out of Daphne's
Bower, in the direction of Lobourne.




CHAPTER VIII

THE BITTER CUP


Farmer Blaize was not so astonished at the visit of Richard Feverel
as that young gentleman expected him to be. The farmer, seated in
his easy-chair in the little low-roofed parlour of an old-fashioned
farm-house, with a long clay pipe on the table at his elbow, and a
veteran pointer at his feet, had already given audience to three
distinguished members of the Feverel blood, who had come separately,
according to their accustomed secretiveness, and with one object. In
the morning it was Sir Austin himself. Shortly after his departure,
arrived Austin Wentworth; close on his heels, Algernon, known about
Lobourne as the Captain, popular wherever he was known. Farmer
Blaize reclined in considerable elation. He had brought these great
people to a pretty low pitch. He had welcomed them hospitably, as a
British yeoman should; but not budged a foot in his demands: not to
the baronet: not to the Captain: not to good young Mr. Wentworth.
For Farmer Blaize was a solid Englishman; and, on hearing from the
baronet a frank confession of the hold he had on the family, he
determined to tighten his hold, and only relax it in exchange for
tangible advantages--compensation to his pocket, his wounded person,
and his still more wounded sentiments: the total indemnity being, in
round figures, three hundred pounds, and a spoken apology from the
prime offender, young Mister Richard. Even then there was a
reservation. Provided, the farmer said, nobody had been tampering
with any of his witnesses. In that case Farmer Blaize declared the
money might go, and he would transport Tom Bakewell, as he had sworn
he would. And it goes hard, too, with an accomplice, by law, added
the farmer, knocking the ashes leisurely out of his pipe. He had no
wish to bring any disgrace anywhere; he respected the inmates of
Raynham Abbey, as in duty bound; he should be sorry to see them in
trouble. Only no tampering with his witnesses. He was a man for Law.
Rank was much: money was much: but Law was more. In this country Law
was above the sovereign. To tamper with the Law was treason to the
realm.

"I come to you direct," the baronet explained. "I tell you candidly
in what way I discovered my son to be mixed up in this miserable
affair. I promise you indemnity for your loss, and an apology that
shall, I trust, satisfy your feelings, assuring you that to tamper
with witnesses is not the province of a Feverel. All I ask of you in
return is, not to press the prosecution. At present it rests with
you. I am bound to do all that lies in my power for this imprisoned
man. How and wherefore my son was prompted to suggest, or assist in,
such an act, I cannot explain, for I do not know."

"Hum!" said the farmer. "I think I do."

"You know the cause?" Sir Austin stared. "I beg you to confide it to
me."

"'Least, I can pretty nigh neighbour it with a guess," said the
farmer. "We an't good friends, Sir Austin, me and your son, just
now--not to say cordial. I, ye see, Sir Austin, I'm a man as don't
like young gentlemen a-poachin' on his grounds without his
permission,--in special when birds is plentiful on their own. It
appear he do like it. Consequently I has to flick this whip--as them
fellers at the races: All in this 'ere Ring's mine! as much as to
say; and who's been hit, he's had fair warnin'. I'm sorry for't, but
that's just the case."

Sir Austin retired to communicate with his son, when he should find
him.

Algernon's interview passed off in ale and promises. He also assured
Farmer Blaize that no Feverel could be affected by his proviso.

No less did Austin Wentworth. The farmer was satisfied.

"Money's safe, I know," said he; "now for the 'pology!" and Farmer
Blaize thrust his legs further out, and his head further back.

The farmer naturally reflected that the three separate visits had
been conspired together. Still the baronet's frankness, and the
baronet's not having reserved himself for the third and final
charge, puzzled him. He was considering whether they were a deep, or
a shallow lot, when young Richard was announced.

A pretty little girl with the roses of thirteen springs in her
cheeks, and abundant beautiful bright tresses, tripped before the
boy, and loitered shyly by the farmer's armchair to steal a look at
the handsome new-comer. She was introduced to Richard as the
farmer's niece, Lucy Desborough, the daughter of a lieutenant in the
Royal Navy, and, what was better, though the farmer did not
pronounce it so loudly, a real good girl.

Neither the excellence of her character, nor her rank in life,
tempted Richard to inspect the little lady. He made an awkward bow,
and sat down.

The farmer's eyes twinkled. "Her father," he continued, "fought and
fell for his coontry. A man as fights for's coontry's a right to
hould up his head--ay! with any in the land. Desb'roughs o' Dorset!
d'ye know that family, Master Feverel?"

Richard did not know them, and, by his air, did not desire to become
acquainted with any offshoot of that family.

"She can make puddens and pies," the farmer went on, regardless of
his auditor's gloom. "She's a lady, as good as the best of 'em. I
don't care about their being Catholics--the Desb'roughs o' Dorset
are gentlemen. And she's good for the pianer, too! She strums to me
of evenin's. I'm for the old tunes: she's for the new. Gal-like!
While she's with me she shall be taught things use'l. She can
parley-voo a good 'un and foot it, as it goes; been in France a
couple of year. I prefer the singin' of 't to the talkin' of 't.
Come, Luce! toon up--eh?--Ye wun't? That song about the
Viffendeer--a female"--Farmer Blaize volunteered the translation of
the title--"who wears the--you guess what! and marches along with
the French sojers: a pretty brazen bit o' goods, I sh'd fancy."

Mademoiselle Lucy corrected her uncle's French, but objected to do
more. The handsome cross boy had almost taken away her voice for
speech, as it was, and sing in his company she could not; so she
stood, a hand on her uncle's chair to stay herself from falling,
while she wriggled a dozen various shapes of refusal, and shook her
head at the farmer with fixed eyes.

"Aha!" laughed the farmer, dismissing her, "they soon learn the
difference 'twixt the young 'un and the old 'un. Go along, Luce! and
learn yer lessons for to-morrow."

Reluctantly the daughter of the Royal Navy glided away. Her uncle's
head followed her to the door, where she dallied to catch a last
impression of the young stranger's lowering face, and darted
through.

Farmer Blaize laughed and chuckled. "She an't so fond of her uncle
as that, every day! Not that she an't a good nurse--the kindest
little soul you'd meet of a winter's walk! She'll read t' ye, and
make drinks, and sing, too, if ye likes it, and she won't be tired.
A obstinate good 'un, she be! Bless her!"

The farmer may have designed, by these eulogies of his niece, to
give his visitor time to recover his composure, and establish a
common topic. His diversion only irritated and confused our
shame-eaten youth. Richard's intention had been to come to the
farmer's threshold: to summon the farmer thither, and in a loud and
haughty tone then and there to take upon himself the whole burden
of the charge against Tom Bakewell. He had strayed, during his
passage to Belthorpe, somewhat back to his old nature; and his being
compelled to enter the house of his enemy, sit in his chair, and
endure an introduction to his family, was more than he bargained
for. He commenced blinking hard in preparation for the horrible dose
to which delay and the farmer's cordiality added inconceivable
bitters. Farmer Blaize was quite at his ease; nowise in a hurry. He
spoke of the weather and the harvest: of recent doings up at the
Abbey: glanced over that year's cricketing; hoped that no future
Feverel would lose a leg to the game. Richard saw and heard Arson in
it all. He blinked harder as he neared the cup. In a moment of
silence, he seized it with a gasp.

"Mr. Blaize! I have come to tell you that I am the person who set
fire to your rick the other night."

An odd contraction formed about the farmer's mouth. He changed his
posture, and said, "Ay? that's what ye're come to tell me, sir?"

"Yes!" said Richard, firmly.

"And that be all?"

"Yes!" Richard reiterated.

The farmer again changed his posture. "Then, my lad, ye've come to
tell me a lie!"

Farmer Blaize looked straight at the boy, undismayed by the dark
flush of ire he had kindled.

"You dare to call me a liar!" cried Richard, starting up.

"I say," the farmer renewed his first emphasis, and smacked his
thigh thereto, "that's a lie!"

Richard held out his clenched fist. "You have twice insulted me. You
have struck me: you have dared to call me a liar. I would have
apologized--I would have asked your pardon, to have got off that
fellow in prison. Yes! I would have degraded myself that another man
should not suffer for my deed"----

"Quite proper!" interposed the farmer.

"And you take this opportunity of insulting me afresh. You're a
coward, sir! nobody but a coward would have insulted me in his own
house."

"Sit ye down, sit ye down, young master," said the farmer,
indicating the chair and cooling the outburst with his hand. "Sit
ye down. Don't ye be hasty. If ye hadn't been hasty t'other day, we
sh'd a been friends yet. Sit ye down, sir. I sh'd be sorry to reckon
you out a liar, Mr. Feverel, or anybody o' your name. I respects yer
father though we're opp'site politics. I'm willin' to think well o'
you. What I say is, that as you say an't the trewth. Mind! I don't
like you none the worse for't. But it an't what is. That's all! You
knows it as well's I!"

Richard, disdaining to show signs of being pacified, angrily
reseated himself. The farmer spoke sense, and the boy, after his
late interview with Austin, had become capable of perceiving vaguely
that a towering passion is hardly the justification for a wrong
course of conduct.

"Come," continued the farmer, not unkindly, "what else have you to
say?"

Here was the same bitter cup he had already once drained brimming at
Richard's lips again! Alas, poor human nature! that empties to the
dregs a dozen of these evil drinks, to evade the single one which
Destiny, less cruel, had insisted upon.

The boy blinked and tossed it off.

"I came to say that I regretted the revenge I had taken on you for
your striking me."

Farmer Blaize nodded.

"And now ye've done, young gentleman?"

Still another cupful!

"I should be very much obliged," Richard formally began, but his
stomach was turned; he could but sip and sip, and gather a distaste
which threatened to make the penitential act impossible. "Very much
obliged," he repeated: "much obliged, if you would be so kind," and
it struck him that had he spoken this at first he would have given
it a wording more persuasive with the farmer and more worthy of his
own pride: more honest, in fact: for a sense of the dishonesty of
what he was saying caused him to cringe and simulate humility to
deceive the farmer, and the more he said the less he felt his words,
and, feeling them less, he inflated them more. "So kind," he
stammered, "so kind" (fancy a Feverel asking this big brute to be so
kind!) "as to do me the favour" (_me_ the favour!) "to exert
yourself" (it's all to please Austin) "to endeavour to--hem! to"
(there's no saying it!)----

The cup was full as ever. Richard dashed at it again.

"What I came to ask is, whether you would have the kindness to try
what you could do" (what an infamous shame to have to beg like
this!) "do to save--do to ensure--whether you would have the
kindness"---- It seemed out of all human power to gulp it down. The
draught grew more and more abhorrent. To proclaim one's iniquity, to
apologize for one's wrongdoing; thus much could be done; but to beg
a favour of the offended party--that was beyond the self-abasement
any Feverel could consent to. Pride, however, whose inevitable
battle is against itself, drew aside the curtains of poor Tom's
prison, crying a second time, "Behold your Benefactor!" and, with
the words burning in his ears, Richard swallowed the dose:

"Well, then, I want you, Mr. Blaize,--if you don't mind--will you
help me to get this man Bakewell off his punishment?"

To do Farmer Blaize justice, he waited very patiently for the boy,
though he could not quite see why he did not take the gate at the
first offer.

"Oh!" said he, when he heard and had pondered on the request. "Hum!
ha! we'll see about it t'morrow. But if he's innocent, you know, we
shan't mak'n guilty."

"It was I did it!" Richard declared.

The farmer's half-amused expression sharpened a bit.

"So, young gentleman! and you're sorry for the night's work?"

"I shall see that you are paid the full extent of your losses."

"Thank'ee," said the farmer drily.

"And, if this poor man is released to-morrow, I don't care what the
amount is."

Farmer Blaize deflected his head twice in silence. "Bribery," one
motion expressed: "Corruption," the other.

"Now," said he, leaning forward, and fixing his elbows on his knees,
while he counted the case at his fingers' ends, "excuse the liberty,
but wishin' to know where this 'ere money's to come from, I sh'd
like jest t'ask if so be Sir Austin know o' this?"

"My father knows nothing of it," replied Richard.

The farmer flung back in his chair. "Lie number Two," said his
shoulders, soured by the British aversion to being plotted at, and
not dealt with openly.

"And ye've the money ready, young gentleman?"

"I shall ask my father for it."

"And he'll hand't out?"

"Certainly he will!"

Richard had not the slightest intention of ever letting his father
into his counsels.

"A good three hundred pounds, ye know?" the farmer suggested.

No consideration of the extent of damages, and the size of the sum,
affected young Richard, who said boldly, "He will not object when I
tell him I want that sum."

It was natural Farmer Blaize should be a trifle suspicious that a
youth's guarantee would hardly be given for his father's readiness
to disburse such a thumping bill, unless he had previously received
his father's sanction and authority.

"Hum!" said he, "why not 'a told him before?"

The farmer threw an objectionable shrewdness into his query, that
caused Richard to compress his mouth and glance high.

Farmer Blaize was positive 'twas a lie.

"Hum! Ye still hold to't you fired the rick?" he asked.

"The blame is mine!" quoth Richard, with the loftiness of a patriot
of old Rome.

"Na, na!" the straightforward Briton put him aside. "Ye did't, or ye
didn't do't. Did ye do't, or no?"

Thrust in a corner, Richard said, "I did it."

Farmer Blaize reached his hand to the bell. It was answered in an
instant by little Lucy, who received orders to fetch in a dependent
at Belthorpe going by the name of the Bantam, and made her exit as
she had entered, with her eyes on the young stranger.

"Now," said the farmer, "these be my principles. I'm a plain man,
Mr. Feverel. Above board with me, and you'll find me handsome. Try
to circumvent me, and I'm a ugly customer. I'll show you I've no
animosity. Your father pays--you apologize. That's enough for me!
Let Tom Bakewell fight't out with the Law, and I'll look on. The Law
wasn't on the spot, I suppose? so the Law ain't much witness. But I
am. Leastwise the Bantam is. I tell you, young gentleman, the
Bantam saw't! It's no moral use whatever your denyin' that ev'dence.
And where's the good, sir, I ask? What comes of 't? Whether it be
you, or whether it be Tom Bakewell--ain't all one? If I holds back,
ain't it sim'lar? It's the trewth I want! And here't comes," added
the farmer, as Miss Lucy ushered in the Bantam, who presented a
curious figure for that rare divinity to enliven.




CHAPTER IX

A FINE DISTINCTION


In build of body, gait and stature, Giles Jinkson, the Bantam, was a
tolerably fair representative of the Punic elephant, whose part,
with diverse anticipations, the generals of the Blaize and Feverel
forces, from opposing ranks, expected him to play. Giles, surnamed
the Bantam, on account of some forgotten sally of his youth or
infancy, moved and looked elephantine. It sufficed that Giles was
well fed to assure that Giles was faithful--if uncorrupted. The farm
which supplied to him ungrudging provender had all his vast capacity
for work in willing exercise: the farmer who held the farm his
instinct reverenced as the fountain-source of beef and bacon, to say
nothing of beer, which was plentiful at Belthorpe, and good. This
Farmer Blaize well knew, and he reckoned consequently that here was
an animal always to be relied on--a sort of human composition out of
dog, horse, and bull, a cut above each of these quadrupeds in
usefulness, and costing proportionately more, but on the whole worth
the money, and therefore invaluable, as everything worth its money
must be to a wise man. When the stealing of grain had been made
known at Belthorpe, the Bantam, a fellow-thresher with Tom Bakewell,
had shared with him the shadow of the guilt. Farmer Blaize, if he
hesitated which to suspect, did not debate a second as to which he
would discard; and, when the Bantam said he had seen Tom secreting
pilkins in a sack, Farmer Blaize chose to believe him, and off went
poor Tom, told to rejoice in the clemency that spared his appearance
at Sessions.

The Bantam's small sleepy orbits saw many things, and just at the
right moment, it seemed. He was certainly the first to give the clue
at Belthorpe on the night of the conflagration, and he may,
therefore, have seen poor Tom retreating stealthily from the scene,
as he averred he did. Lobourne had its say on the subject. Rustic
Lobourne hinted broadly at a young woman in the case, and moreover,
told a tale of how these fellow-threshers had, in noble rivalry, one
day turned upon each other to see which of the two threshed the
best; whereof the Bantam still bore marks, and malice, it was said.
However, there he stood, and tugged his forelocks to the company,
and if Truth really had concealed herself in him she must have been
hard set to find her unlikeliest hiding-place.

"Now," said the farmer, marshalling forth his elephant with the
confidence of one who delivers his ace of trumps, "tell this young
gentleman what ye saw on the night of the fire, Bantam!"

The Bantam jerked a bit of a bow to his patron, and then swung
round, fully obscuring him from Richard.

Richard fixed his eyes on the floor, while the Bantam in rudest
Doric commenced his narrative. Knowing what was to come, and
thoroughly nerved to confute the main incident, Richard barely
listened to his barbarous locution: but when the recital arrived at
the point where the Bantam affirmed he had seen "T'm Baak'll wi's
owen hoies," Richard faced him, and was amazed to find himself being
mutely addressed by a series of intensely significant grimaces,
signs, and winks.

"What do you mean? Why are you making those faces at me?" cried the
boy indignantly.

Farmer Blaize leaned round the Bantam to have a look at him, and
beheld the stolidest mask ever given to man.

"Bain't makin' no faces at nobody," growled the sulky elephant.

The farmer commanded him to face about and finish.

"A see T'm Baak'll," the Bantam recommenced, and again the
contortions of a horrible wink were directed at Richard. The boy
might well believe this churl was lying, and he did, and was
emboldened to exclaim--

"You never saw Tom Bakewell set fire to that rick!"

The Bantam swore to it, grimacing an accompaniment.

"I tell you," said Richard, "I put the lucifers there myself!"

The suborned elephant was staggered. He meant to telegraph to the
young gentleman that he was loyal and true to certain gold pieces
that had been given him, and that in the right place and at the
right time he should prove so. Why was he thus suspected? Why was he
not understood?

"A thowt I see 'un, then," muttered the Bantam, trying a middle
course.

This brought down on him the farmer, who roared, "Thought! Ye
thought! What d'ye mean? Speak out, and don't be thinkin'. Thought?
What the devil's that?"

"How could he see who it was on a pitch-dark night?" Richard put in.

"Thought!" the farmer bellowed louder. "Thought--Devil take ye, when
ye took yer oath on't. Hulloa! What are ye screwin' yer eye at Mr.
Feverel for?--I say, young gentleman, have you spoken to this chap
before now?"

"I?" replied Richard. "I have not seen him before."

Farmer Blaize grasped the two arms of the chair he sat on, and
glared his doubts.

"Come," said he to the Bantam, "speak out, and ha' done wi't. Say
what ye saw, and none o' yer thoughts. Damn yer thoughts! Ye saw Tom
Bakewell fire that there rick!" The farmer pointed at some musk-pots
in the window. "What business ha' you to be a-thinkin'? You're a
witness? Thinkin' an't ev'dence. What'll ye say to-morrow before
magistrate! Mind! what you say to-day, you'll stick by to-morrow."

Thus adjured, the Bantam hitched his breech. What on earth the young
gentleman meant he was at a loss to speculate. He could not believe
that the young gentleman wanted to be transported, but if he had
been paid to help that, why, he would. And considering that this
day's evidence rather bound him down to the morrow's, he determined,
after much ploughing and harrowing through obstinate shocks of hair,
to be not altogether positive as to the person. It is possible that
he became thereby more a mansion of truth than he previously had
been; for the night, as he said, was so dark that you could not see
your hand before your face; and though, as he expressed it, you
might be mortal sure of a man, you could not identify him upon oath,
and the party he had taken for Tom Bakewell, and could have sworn
to, might have been the young gentleman present, especially as he
was ready to swear it upon oath.

So ended the Bantam.

No sooner had he ceased, than Farmer Blaize jumped up from his
chair, and made a fine effort to lift him out of the room from the
point of his toe. He failed, and sank back groaning with the pain of
the exertion and disappointment.

"They're liars, every one!" he cried. "Liars, perj'rers, bribers,
and c'rrupters!--Stop!" to the Bantam, who was slinking away.
"You've done for yerself already! You swore to it!"

"A din't!" said the Bantam, doggedly.

"You swore to't," the farmer vociferated afresh.

The Bantam played a tune upon the handle of the door, and still
affirmed that he did not; a double contradiction at which the farmer
absolutely raged in his chair, and was hoarse, as he called out a
third time that the Bantam had sworn to it.

"Noa!" said the Bantam, ducking his poll. "Noa!" he repeated in a
lower note; and then, while a sombre grin betokening idiotic
enjoyment of his profound casuistical quibble worked at his jaw:

"Not up'n o-ath!" he added, with a twitch of the shoulder and an
angular jerk of the elbow.

Farmer Blaize looked vacantly at Richard, as if to ask him what he
thought of England's peasantry after the sample they had there.
Richard would have preferred not to laugh, but his dignity gave way
to his sense of the ludicrous, and he let fly a shout. The farmer
was in no laughing mood. He turned a wide eye back to the door.
"Lucky for'm," he exclaimed, seeing the Bantam had vanished, for his
fingers itched to break that stubborn head. He grew very puffy, and
addressed Richard solemnly:

"Now, look ye here, Mr. Feverel! You've been a-tampering with my
witness. It's no use denyin'! I say y' 'ave, sir! You, or some of
ye. I don't care about no Feverel! My witness there has been bribed.
The Bantam's been bribed," and he shivered his pipe with an
energetic thump on the table--"bribed! I knows it! I could swear
to't!"----

"Upon oath?" Richard inquired, with a grave face.

"Ay, upon oath!" said the farmer, not observing the impertinence.

"I'd take my Bible oath on't! He's been corrupted, my principal
witness! Oh, it's dam cunnin', but it won't do the trick. I'll
transpoort Tom Bakewell, sure as a gun. He shall travel, that man
shall. Sorry for you, Mr. Feverel--sorry you haven't seen how to
treat me proper--you, or yours. Money won't do everything--no! it
won't. It'll c'rrupt a witness, but it won't clear a felon. I'd ha'
'scused you, sir! You're a boy and'll learn better. I asked no more
than payment and a 'pology; and that I'd ha' taken content--always
provided my witnesses weren't tampered with. Now you must stand yer
luck, all o' ye."

Richard stood up and replied, "Very well, Mr. Blaize."

"And if," continued the farmer, "Tom Bakewell don't drag you into't
after 'm, why, you're safe, as I hope ye'll be, sincere!"

"It was not in consideration of my own safety that I sought this
interview with you," said Richard, head erect.

"Grant ye that," the farmer responded. "Grant ye that! Yer bold
enough, young gentleman--comes of the blood that should be! If y'
had only ha' spoke trewth!--I believe yer father--believe every word
he said. I do wish I could ha' said as much for Sir Austin's son and
heir."

"What!" cried Richard, with an astonishment hardly to be feigned,
"you have seen my father?"

But Farmer Blaize had now such a scent for lies that he could detect
them where they did not exist, and mumbled gruffly,

"Ay, we knows all about that!"

The boy's perplexity saved him from being irritated. Who could have
told his father? An old fear of his father came upon him, and a
touch of an old inclination to revolt.

"My father knows of this?" said he, very loudly, and staring, as he
spoke, right through the farmer. "Who has played me false? Who would
betray me to him? It was Austin! No one knew it but Austin. Yes, and
it was Austin who persuaded me to come here and submit to these
indignities. Why couldn't he be open with me? I shall never trust
him again!"----

"And why not you with me, young gentleman?" said the farmer. "I sh'd
trust you if ye had."

Richard did not see the analogy. He bowed stiffly and bade him good
afternoon.

Farmer Blaize pulled the bell. "'Company the young gentleman out,
Lucy," he waved to the little damsel in the doorway. "Do the
honours. And, Mr. Richard, ye might ha' made a friend o' me, sir,
and it's not too late so to do. I'm not cruel, but I hate lies. I
whipped my boy Tom, bigger than you, for not bein' above board, only
yesterday,--ay! made 'un stand within swing o' this chair, and
take's measure. Now, if ye'll come down to me, and speak trewth
before the trial--if it's only five minutes before't; or if Sir
Austin, who's a gentleman, 'll say there's been no tamperin' with
any o' my witnesses, his word for't--well and good! I'll do my best
to help off Tom Bakewell. And I'm glad, young gentleman, you've got
a conscience about a poor man, though he's a villain. Good
afternoon, sir."

Richard marched hastily out of the room, and through the garden,
never so much as deigning a glance at his wistful little guide, who
hung at the garden gate to watch him up the lane, wondering a world
of fancies about the handsome proud boy.




CHAPTER X

RICHARD PASSES THROUGH HIS PRELIMINARY ORDEAL, AND IS THE OCCASION
OF AN APHORISM


To have determined upon an act something akin to heroism in its way, and
to have fulfilled it by lying heartily, and so subverting the whole
structure built by good resolution, seems a sad downfall if we forget
what human nature, in its green weedy spring, is composed of. Young
Richard had quitted his cousin Austin fully resolved to do his penance
and drink the bitter cup; and he had drunk it; drained many cups to the
dregs; and it was to no purpose. Still they floated before him, brimmed,
trebly bitter. Away from Austin's influence, he was almost the same boy
who had slipped the guinea into Tom Bakewell's hand, and the lucifers
into Farmer Blaize's rick. For good seed is long ripening; a good boy is
not made in a minute. Enough that the seed was in him. He chafed on his
road to Raynham at the scene he had just endured, and the figure of
Belthorpe's fat tenant burnt like hot copper on the tablet of his brain,
insufferably condescending, and, what was worse, in the right. Richard,
obscured as his mind's eye was by wounded pride, saw that clearly, and
hated his enemy for it the more.

Heavy Benson's tongue was knelling dinner as Richard arrived at the
Abbey. He hurried up to his room to dress. Accident, or design, had
laid the book of Sir Austin's aphorisms open on the dressing-table.
Hastily combing his hair, Richard glanced down and read--

"The Dog returneth to his vomit: the Liar must eat his Lie."

Underneath was interjected in pencil: "The Devil's mouthful!"

Young Richard ran downstairs feeling that his father had struck him
in the face.

Sir Austin marked the scarlet stain on his son's cheek-bones. He sought
the youth's eye, but Richard would not look, and sat conning his plate,
an abject copy of Adrian's succulent air at that employment. How could
he pretend to the relish of an epicure when he was painfully
endeavouring to masticate The Devil's mouthful?

Heavy Benson sat upon the wretched dinner. Hippias, usually the silent
member, as if awakened by the unnatural stillness, became sprightly,
like the goatsucker owl at night, and spoke much of his book, his
digestion, and his dreams, and was spared both by Algernon and Adrian.
One inconsequent dream he related, about fancying himself quite young
and rich, and finding himself suddenly in a field cropping razors
around him, when, just as he had, by steps dainty as those of a French
dancing-master, reached the middle, he to his dismay beheld a path clear
of the bloodthirsty steel-crop, which he might have taken at first had
he looked narrowly; and there he was.

Hippias's brethren regarded him with eyes that plainly said they wished
he had remained there. Sir Austin, however, drew forth his note-book,
and jotted down a reflection. A composer of aphorisms can pluck blossoms
even from a razor-crop. Was not Hippias's dream the very counterpart of
Richard's position? He, had he looked narrowly, might have taken the
clear path: he, too, had been making dainty steps till he was surrounded
by the grinning blades. And from that text Sir Austin preached to his
son when they were alone. Little Clare was still too unwell to be
permitted to attend the dessert, and father and son were soon closeted
together.

It was a strange meeting. They seemed to have been separated so long.
The father took his son's hand; they sat without a word passing between
them. Silence said most. The boy did not understand his father: his
father frequently thwarted him: at times he thought his father foolish:
but that paternal pressure of his hand was eloquent to him of how warmly
he was beloved. He tried once or twice to steal his hand away, conscious
it was melting him. The spirit of his pride, and old rebellion,
whispered him to be hard, unbending, resolute. Hard he had entered his
father's study: hard he had met his father's eyes. He could not meet
them now. His father sat beside him gently; with a manner that was
almost meekness, so he loved this boy. The poor gentleman's lips moved.
He was praying internally to God for him.

By degrees an emotion awoke in the boy's bosom. Love is that blessed
wand which wins the waters from the hardness of the heart. Richard
fought against it, for the dignity of old rebellion. The tears would
come; hot and struggling over the dams of pride. Shamefully fast they
began to fall. He could no longer conceal them, or check the sobs. Sir
Austin drew him nearer and nearer, till the beloved head was on his
breast.

An hour afterwards, Adrian Harley, Austin Wentworth, and Algernon
Feverel were summoned to the baronet's study.

Adrian came last. There was a style of affable omnipotence about the
wise youth as he slung himself into a chair, and made an arch of the
points of his fingers, through which to gaze on his blundering
kinsmen. Careless as one may be whose sagacity has foreseen, and
whose benevolent efforts have forestalled, the point of danger at
the threshold, Adrian crossed his legs, and only intruded on their
introductory remarks so far as to hum half audibly at intervals--

    "Ripton and Richard were two pretty men,"

in parody of the old ballad. Young Richard's red eyes, and the baronet's
ruffled demeanour, told him that an explanation had taken place, and a
reconciliation. That was well. The baronet would now pay cheerfully.
Adrian summed and considered these matters, and barely listened when the
baronet called attention to what he had to say: which was elaborately to
inform all present, what all present very well knew, that a rick had
been fired, that his son was implicated as an accessory to the fact,
that the perpetrator was now imprisoned, and that Richard's family were,
as it seemed to him, bound in honour to do their utmost to effect the
man's release.

Then the baronet stated that he had himself been down to Belthorpe, his
son likewise: and that he had found every disposition in Blaize to meet
his wishes.

The lamp which ultimately was sure to be lifted up to illumine the
acts of this secretive race began slowly to dispread its rays; and,
as statement followed statement, they saw that all had known of the
business: that all had been down to Belthorpe: all save the wise
youth Adrian, who, with due deference and a sarcastic shrug,
objected to the proceeding, as putting them in the hands of the man
Blaize. His wisdom shone forth in an oration so persuasive and
aphoristic that had it not been based on a plea against honour, it
would have made Sir Austin waver. But its basis was expediency, and
the baronet had a better aphorism of his own to confute him with.

"Expediency is man's wisdom, Adrian Harley. Doing right is God's."

Adrian curbed his desire to ask Sir Austin whether an attempt to
counteract the just working of the law was doing right. The direct
application of an aphorism was unpopular at Raynham.

"I am to understand then," said he, "that Blaize consents not to
press the prosecution."

"Of course he won't," Algernon remarked. "Confound him! he'll have
his money, and what does he want besides?"

"These agricultural gentleman are delicate customers to deal with.
However, if he really consents"----

"I have his promise," said the baronet, fondling his son.

Young Richard looked up to his father, as if he wished to speak. He
said nothing, and Sir Austin took it as a mute reply to his
caresses, and caressed him the more. Adrian perceived a reserve in
the boy's manner, and as he was not quite satisfied that his chief
should suppose him to have been the only idle, and not the most
acute and vigilant member of the family, he commenced a
cross-examination of him by asking who had last spoken with the
tenant of Belthorpe?

"I think I saw him last," murmured Richard, and relinquished his
father's hand.

Adrian fastened on his prey. "And left him with a distinct and
satisfactory assurance of his amicable intentions?"

"No," said Richard.

"Not?" the Feverels joined in astounded chorus.

Richard sidled away from his father, and repeated a shamefaced "No."

"Was he hostile?" inquired Adrian, smoothing his palms, and smiling.

"Yes," the boy confessed.

Here was quite another view of their position. Adrian, generally
patient of results, triumphed strongly at having evoked it, and
turned upon Austin Wentworth, reproving him for inducing the boy to
go down to Belthorpe. Austin looked grieved. He feared that Richard
had failed in his good resolve.

"I thought it his duty to go," he observed.

"It was!" said the baronet, emphatically.

"And you see what comes of it, sir," Adrian struck in. "These
agricultural gentlemen, I repeat, are delicate customers to deal
with. For my part I would prefer being in the hands of a policeman.
We are decidedly collared by Blaize. What were his words, Ricky?
Give it in his own Doric."

"He said he would transport Tom Bakewell."

Adrian smoothed his palms, and smiled again. Then they could afford
to defy Mr. Blaize, he informed them significantly, and made once
more a mysterious allusion to the Punic elephant, bidding his
relatives be at peace. They were attaching, in his opinion, too much
importance to Richard's complicity. The man was a fool, and a very
extraordinary arsonite, to have an accomplice at all. It was a thing
unknown in the annals of rick-burning. But one would be severer than
law itself to say that a boy of fourteen had instigated to crime a
full-grown man. At that rate the boy was "father of the man" with a
vengeance, and one might hear next that "the baby was father of the
boy." They would find common sense a more benevolent ruler than
poetical metaphysics.

When he had done, Austin, with his customary directness, asked him
what he meant.

"I confess, Adrian," said the baronet, hearing him expostulate with
Austin's stupidity, "I for one am at a loss. I have heard that this
man, Bakewell, chooses voluntarily not to inculpate my son. Seldom
have I heard anything that so gratified me. It is a view of innate
nobleness in the rustic's character which many a gentleman might
take example from. We are bound to do our utmost for the man." And,
saying that he should pay a second visit to Belthorpe, to inquire
into the reasons for the farmer's sudden exposition of vindictiveness,
Sir Austin rose.

Before he left the room, Algernon asked Richard if the farmer had
vouchsafed any reasons, and the boy then spoke of the tampering with
the witnesses, and the Bantam's "Not upon oath!" which caused Adrian
to choke with laughter. Even the baronet smiled at so cunning a
distinction as that involved in swearing a thing, and not swearing
it upon oath.

"How little," he exclaimed, "does one yeoman know another! To
elevate a distinction into a difference is the natural action of
their minds. I will point that out to Blaize. He shall see that the
idea is native born."

Richard saw his father go forth. Adrian, too, was ill at ease.

"This trotting down to Belthorpe spoils all," said he. "The affair
would pass over to-morrow--Blaize has no witnesses. The old rascal
is only standing out for more money."

"No, he isn't," Richard corrected him. "It's not that. I'm sure he
believes his witnesses have been tampered with, as he calls it."

"What if they have, boy?" Adrian put it boldly. "The ground is cut
from under his feet."

"Blaize told me that if my father would give his word there had been
nothing of the sort, he would take it. My father will give his
word."

"Then," said Adrian, "you had better stop him from going down."

Austin looked at Adrian keenly, and questioned him whether he
thought the farmer was justified in his suspicions. The wise youth
was not to be entrapped. He had only been given to understand that
the witnesses were tolerably unstable, and, like the Bantam, ready
to swear lustily, but not upon the Book. How given to understand, he
chose not to explain, but he reiterated that the chief should not be
allowed to go down to Belthorpe.

Sir Austin was in the lane leading to the farm when he heard steps
of some one running behind him. It was dark, and he shook off the
hand that laid hold of his cloak, roughly, not recognizing his son.

"It's I, sir," said Richard panting. "Pardon me. You mustn't go in
there."

"Why not?" said the baronet, putting his arm about him.

"Not now," continued the boy. "I will tell you all to-night. I must
see the farmer myself. It was my fault, sir. I--I lied to him--the
Liar must eat his Lie. Oh, forgive me for disgracing you, sir. I did
it--I hope I did it to save Tom Bakewell. Let me go in alone, and
speak the truth."

"Go, and I will wait for you here," said his father.

The wind that bowed the old elms, and shivered the dead leaves in
the air, had a voice and a meaning for the baronet during that
half-hour's lonely pacing up and down under the darkness, awaiting
his boy's return. The solemn gladness of his heart gave nature a
tongue. Through the desolation flying overhead--the wailing of the
Mother of Plenty across the bare-swept land--he caught intelligible
signs of the beneficent order of the universe, from a heart newly
confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as
manifested in the dear child who had just left him; confirmed in its
belief in the ultimate victory of good within us, without which
nature has neither music nor meaning, and is rock, stone, tree, and
nothing more.

In the dark, the dead leaves beating on his face, he had a word for
his note-book: "There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness:
from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom, whence we see that this
world is well designed."




CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH THE LAST ACT OF THE BAKEWELL COMEDY IS CLOSED IN A LETTER


Of all the chief actors in the Bakewell Comedy, Master Ripton
Thompson awaited the fearful morning which was to decide Tom's fate,
in dolefullest mood, and suffered the gravest mental terrors.
Adrian, on parting with him, had taken casual occasion to speak of
the position of the criminal in modern Europe, assuring him that
International Treaty now did what Universal Empire had aforetime
done, and that among Atlantic barbarians now, as among the Scythians
of old, an offender would find precarious refuge and an emissary
haunting him.

In the paternal home, under the roofs of Law, and removed from the
influence of his conscienceless young chief, the staggering nature
of the act he had put his hand to, its awful felonious aspect,
overwhelmed Ripton. He saw it now for the first time. "Why, it's
next to murder!" he cried out to his amazed soul, and wandered about
the house with a prickly skin. Thoughts of America, and commencing
life afresh as an innocent gentleman, had crossed his disordered
brain. He wrote to his friend Richard, proposing to collect
disposable funds, and embark, in case of Tom's breaking his word, or
of accidental discovery. He dared not confide the secret to his
family, as his leader had sternly enjoined him to avoid any weakness
of that kind; and, being by nature honest and communicative, the
restriction was painful, and melancholy fell upon the boy. Mama
Thompson attributed it to love. The daughters of parchment rallied
him concerning Miss Clare Forey. His hourly letters to Raynham, and
silence as to everything and everybody there, his nervousness, and
unwonted propensity to sudden inflammation of the cheeks, were set
down for sure signs of the passion. Miss Letitia Thompson, the
pretty and least parchmenty one, destined by her Papa for the heir
of Raynham, and perfectly aware of her brilliant future, up to which
she had, since Ripton's departure, dressed and grimaced, and studied
cadences (the latter with such success, though not yet fifteen, that
she languished to her maid, and melted the small factotum
footman)--Miss Letty, whose insatiable thirst for intimations about
the young heir Ripton could not satisfy, tormented him daily in
revenge, and once, quite unconsciously, gave the lad a fearful turn;
for after dinner, when Mr. Thompson read the paper by the fire,
preparatory to sleeping at his accustomed post, and Mama Thompson
and her submissive female brood sat tasking the swift intricacies of
the needle, and emulating them with the tongue, Miss Letty stole
behind Ripton's chair, and introduced between him and his book the
Latin initial letter, large and illuminated, of the theme she
supposed to be absorbing him, as it did herself. The unexpected
vision of this accusing Captain of the Alphabet, this resplendent
and haunting A, fronting him bodily, threw Ripton straight back in
his chair, while Guilt, with her ancient indecision what colours to
assume on detection, flew from red to white, from white to red,
across his fallen chaps. Letty laughed triumphantly. Amor, the word
she had in mind, certainly has a connection with Arson.

But the delivery of a letter into Master Ripton's hands, furnished
her with other and likelier appearances to study. For scarce had
Ripton plunged his head into the missive than he gave way to violent
transports, such as the healthy-minded little damsel, for all her
languishing cadences, deemed she really could express were a
downright declaration to be made to her. The boy did not stop at
table. Quickly recollecting the presence of his family, he rushed to
his own room. And now the girl's ingenuity was taxed to gain
possession of that letter. She succeeded, of course, she being a
huntress with few scruples and the game unguarded. With the eyes of
amazement she read this foreign matter:

  "Dear Ripton,--If Tom had been committed I would have shot
  old Blaize. Do you know my father was behind us that night
  when Clare saw the ghost and heard all we said before the fire
  burst out. It is no use trying to conceal anything from him.
  Well as you are in an awful state I will tell you all about it.
  After you left Ripton I had a conversation with Austin and he
  persuaded me to go down to old Blaize and ask him to help off
  Tom. I went, for I would have done anything for Tom after what
  he said to Austin and I defied the old churl to do his worst.
  Then he said if my father paid the money and nobody had tampered
  with his witnesses he would not mind if Tom did get off and he
  had his chief witness in called the Bantam very like his master
  I think and the Bantam began winking at me tremendjously as you
  say, and said he had sworn he saw Tom Bakewell but not upon
  oath. He meant not on the Bible. He could swear to it but not
  on the Bible. I burst out laughing and you should have seen
  the rage old Blaize was in. It was splendid fun. Then we had a
  consultation at home Austin Rady my father Uncle Algernon who
  has come down to us again and your friend in prosperity and
  adversity R. D. F. My father said he would go down to old Blaize
  and give him the word of a gentleman we had not tampered with
  his witnesses and when he was gone we were all talking and Rady
  says he must not see the farmer. I am as certain as I live that
  it was Rady bribed the Bantam. Well I ran and caught up with my
  father and told him not to go in to old Blaize but I would and
  eat my words and tell him the truth. He waited for me in the
  lane. Never mind what passed between me and old Blaize. He
  made me beg and pray of him not to press it against Tom and
  then to complete it he brought in a little girl a niece of his and
  says to me she's your best friend after all and told me to thank
  her. A little girl twelve years of age. What business had she
  to mix herself up in my matters. Depend upon it Ripton wherever
  there is mischief there are girls I think. She had the insolence
  to notice my face, and ask me not to be unhappy. I was polite
  of course but I would not look at her. Well the morning came
  and Tom was had up before Sir Miles Papworth. It was Sir Miles
  gout gave us the time or Tom would have been had up before we
  could do anything. Adrian did not want me to go but my father
  said I should accompany him and held my hand all the time. I
  shall be careful about getting into these scrapes again. When
  you have done anything honourable you do not mind but getting
  among policemen and magistrates makes you ashamed of yourself.
  Sir Miles was very attentive to my father and me and dead against
  Tom. We sat beside him and Tom was brought in. Sir Miles told
  my father that if there was one thing that showed a low villain
  it was rick-burning. What do you think of that. I looked him
  straight in the face and he said to me he was doing me a service
  in getting Tom committed and clearing the country of such fellows
  and Rady began laughing. I hate Rady. My father said his son
  was not in haste to inherit and have estates of his own to watch
  and Sir Miles laughed too. I thought we were discovered at first.
  Then they began the examination of Tom. The Tinker was the first
  witness and he proved that Tom had spoken against old Blaize and
  said something about burning his rick. I wished I had stood in the
  lane to Bursley with him alone. Our country lawyer we engaged
  for Tom cross-questioned him and then he said he was not ready
  to swear to the exact words that had passed between him and
  Tom. I should think not. Then came another who swore he had
  seen Tom lurking about the farmer's grounds that night. Then
  came the Bantam and I saw him look at Rady. I was tremendjously
  excited and my father kept pressing my hand. Just fancy my being
  brought to feel that a word from that fellow would make me
  miserable for life and he must perjure himself to help me. That
  comes of giving way to passion. My father says when we do that
  we are calling in the devil as doctor. Well the Bantam was told
  to state what he had seen and the moment he began Rady who was
  close by me began to shake and he was laughing I knew though
  his face was as grave as Sir Miles. You never heard such a
  rigmarole but I could not laugh. He said he thought he was
  certain he had seen somebody by the rick and it was Tom Bakewell
  who was the only man he knew who had a grudge against Farmer
  Blaize and if the object had been a little bigger he would not
  mind swearing to Tom and would swear to him for he was dead
  certain it was Tom only what he saw looked smaller and it was
  pitch-dark at the time. He was asked what time it was he saw
  the person steal away from the rick and then he began to scratch
  his head and said supper-time. Then they asked what time he had
  supper and he said nine o'clock by the clock and we proved that
  at nine o'clock Tom was drinking in the ale-house with the
  Tinker at Bursley and Sir Miles swore and said he was afraid
  he could not commit Tom and when he heard that Tom looked up
  at me and I say he is a noble fellow and no one shall sneer at Tom
  while I live. Mind that. Well Sir Miles asked us to dine with
  him and Tom was safe and I am to have him and educate him if I
  like for my servant and I will. And I will give money to his
  mother and make her rich and he shall never repent he knew me.
  I say Rip. The Bantam must have seen _me_. It was when I went
  to stick in the lucifers. As we were all going home from Sir
  Miles's at night he has lots of redfaced daughters but I did not
  dance with them though they had music and were full of fun and
  I did not care to I was so delighted and almost let it out. When
  we left and rode home Rady said to my father the Bantam was not
  such a fool as he was thought and my father said one must be in
  a state of great personal exaltation to apply that epithet to
  any man and Rady shut his mouth and I gave my pony a clap of the
  heel for joy. I think my father suspects what Rady did and does
  not approve of it. And he need not have done it after all and
  might have spoilt it. I have been obliged to order him not to
  call me Ricky for he stops short at Rick so that everybody
  knows what he means. My dear Austin is going to South America.
  My pony is in capital condition. My father is the cleverest and
  best man in the world. Clare is a little better. I am quite happy.
  I hope we shall meet soon my dear Old Rip and we will not get
  into any more tremendjous scrapes will we.--I remain, Your sworn
  friend,

                                            "RICHARD DORIA FEVEREL."

  "_P.S._ I am to have a nice River Yacht. Good-bye, Rip. Mind you
  learn to box. Mind you are not to show this to any of your friends
  on pain of my displeasure.

  "N.B. Lady B. was so angry when I told her that I had not come to
  her before. She would do anything in the world for me. I like her
  next best to my father and Austin. Good-bye old Rip."

Poor little Letitia, after three perusals of this ingenuous epistle,
where the laws of punctuation were so disregarded, resigned it to
one of the pockets of her brother Ripton's best jacket, deeply
smitten with the careless composer. And so ended the last act of the
Bakewell Comedy, on which the curtain closes with Sir Austin's
pointing out to his friends the beneficial action of the System in
it from beginning to end.




CHAPTER XII

THE BLOSSOMING SEASON


Laying of ghosts is a public duty, and as the mystery of the
apparition that had frightened little Clare was never solved on the
stage of events at Raynham, where dread walked the Abbey, let us go
behind the scenes a moment. Morally superstitious as the baronet
was, the character of his mind was opposed to anything like
spiritual agency in the affairs of men, and, when the matter was
made clear to him, it shook off a weight of weakness and restored
his mental balance; so that from this time he went about more like
the man he had once been, grasping more thoroughly the great truth,
that This World is well designed. Nay, he could laugh on hearing
Adrian, in reminiscence of the ill luck of one of the family
members at its first manifestation, call the uneasy spirit,
Algernon's Leg.

Mrs. Doria was outraged. She maintained that her child had seen----.
Not to believe in it was almost to rob her of her personal property.
After satisfactorily studying his old state of mind in her, Sir
Austin, moved by pity, took her aside one day and showed her that
her Ghost could write words in the flesh. It was a letter from the
unhappy lady who had given Richard birth,--brief cold lines, simply
telling him his house would be disturbed by her no more. Cold lines,
but penned by what heart-broken abnegation, and underlying them with
what anguish of soul! Like most who dealt with him, Lady Feverel
thought her husband a man fatally stern and implacable, and she
acted as silly creatures will act when they fancy they see a fate
against them: she neither petitioned for her right nor claimed it:
she tried to ease her heart's yearning by stealth, and now she
renounced all. Mrs. Doria, not wanting in the family tenderness and
softness, shuddered at him for accepting the sacrifice so
composedly: but he bade her to think how distracting to this boy
would be the sight of such relations between mother and father. A
few years, and as man he should know, and judge, and love her. "Let
this be her penance, not inflicted by me!" Mrs. Doria bowed to the
System for another, not opining when it would be her turn to bow for
herself.

Further behind the scenes we observe Rizzio and Mary grown older,
much disenchanted: she discrowned, dishevelled,--he with gouty
fingers on a greasy guitar. The Diaper Sandoe of promise lends his
pen for small hires. His fame has sunk; his bodily girth has
sensibly increased. What he can do, and will do, is still his theme;
meantime the juice of the juniper is in requisition, and it seems
that those small hires cannot be performed without it. Returning
from her wretched journey to her wretcheder home, the lady had to
listen to a mild reproof from easy-going Diaper,--a reproof so mild
that he couched it in blank verse: for, seldom writing metrically
now, he took to talking it. With a fluent sympathetic tear, he
explained to her that she was damaging her interests by these
proceedings; nor did he shrink from undertaking to elucidate
wherefore. Pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth, he told her
that the poverty she lived in was utterly unbefitting her gentle
nurture, and that he had reason to believe--could assure her--that
an annuity was on the point of being granted her by her husband. And
Diaper broke his bud of a smile into full flower as he delivered
this information. She learnt that he had applied to her husband for
money. It is hard to have one's prop of self-respect cut away just
when we are suffering a martyr's agony at the stake. There was a
five minutes tragic colloquy in the recesses behind the
scenes,--totally tragic to Diaper, who had fondly hoped to bask in
the warm sun of that annuity, and re-emerge from his state of grub.
The lady then wrote the letter Sir Austin held open to his sister.
The atmosphere behind the scenes is not wholesome, so, having laid
the Ghost, we will return and face the curtain.

That infinitesimal dose of THE WORLD which Master Ripton Thompson
had furnished to the System with such instantaneous and surprising
effect was considered by Sir Austin to have worked well, and to be
for the time quite sufficient, so that Ripton did not receive a
second invitation to Raynham, and Richard had no special intimate of
his own age to rub his excessive vitality against, and wanted none.
His hands were full enough with Tom Bakewell. Moreover, his father
and he were heart in heart. The boy's mind was opening, and turned
to his father affectionately reverent. At this period, when the
young savage grows into higher influences, the faculty of worship is
foremost in him. At this period Jesuits will stamp the future of
their chargeling flocks; and all who bring up youth by a System, and
watch it, know that it is the malleable moment. Boys possessing any
mental or moral force to give them a tendency, then predestinate
their careers; or, if under supervision, take the impress that is
given them: not often to cast it off, and seldom to cast it off
altogether.

In Sir Austin's Note-book was written: "Between Simple Boyhood and
Adolescence--The Blossoming Season--on the threshold of Puberty,
there is one Unselfish Hour--say, Spiritual Seed-time."

He took care that good seed should be planted in Richard, and that
the most fruitful seed for a youth, namely, Example, should be of a
kind to germinate in him the love of every form of nobleness.

"I am only striving to make my son a Christian," he said, answering
them who persisted in expostulating with the System. And to these
instructions he gave an aim: "First be virtuous," he told his son,
"and then serve your country with heart and soul." The youth was
instructed to cherish an ambition for statesmanship, and he and his
father read history and the speeches of British orators to some
purpose; for one day Sir Austin found him leaning cross-legged, and
with his hand to his chin, against a pedestal supporting the bust of
Chatham, contemplating the hero of our Parliament, his eyes
streaming with tears.

People said the baronet carried the principle of Example so far that
he only retained his boozing dyspeptic brother Hippias at Raynham in
order to exhibit to his son the woeful retribution nature wreaked
upon a life of indulgence; poor Hippias having now become a walking
complaint. This was unjust, but there is no doubt he made use of
every illustration to disgust or encourage his son that his
neighbourhood afforded him, and did not spare his brother, for whom
Richard entertained a contempt in proportion to his admiration of
his father, and was for flying into penitential extremes which Sir
Austin had to soften.

The boy prayed with his father morning and night.

"How is it, sir," he said one night, "I can't get Tom Bakewell to
pray?"

"Does he refuse?" Sir Austin asked.

"He seems to be ashamed to," Richard replied. "He wants to know what
is the good? and I don't know what to tell him."

"I'm afraid it has gone too far with him," said Sir Austin, "and
until he has had some deep sorrows he will not find the divine want
of Prayer. Strive, my son, when you represent the people, to provide
for their education. He feels everything now through a dull
impenetrable rind. Culture is half-way to heaven. Tell him, my son,
should he ever be brought to ask how he may know the efficacy of
Prayer, and that his prayer will be answered, tell him (he quoted
THE PILGRIM'S SCRIP):

"'Who rises from Prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.'"

"I will, sir," said Richard, and went to sleep happy.

Happy in his father and in himself, the youth now lived. Conscience
was beginning to inhabit him, and he carried some of the freighta

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