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The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Complete

by George Meredith · English · Gutenberg #4452 · 1,204,149 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Complete

Author: George Meredith


        
Release date: November 3, 2004 [eBook #4452]
                Most recently updated: December 11, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4452

Credits: David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND — COMPLETE ***




THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND

By George Meredith


CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I. I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION
 CHAPTER II. AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT
 CHAPTER III. DIPWELL FARM
 CHAPTER IV. I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR
 CHAPTER V. I MAKE A DEAR FRIEND
 CHAPTER VI. A TALE OF A GOOSE
 CHAPTER VII. A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD
 CHAPTER VIII. JANET ILCHESTER
 CHAPTER IX. AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED
 CHAPTER X. AN EXPEDITION
 CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT
 CHAPTER XII. WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE
 CHAPTER XIII. WE CONDUCT SEVERAL LEARNED ARGUMENTS WITH THE CAPTAIN OF THE PRISCILLA
 CHAPTER XIV. I MEET OLD FRIENDS
 CHAPTER XV. WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST
 CHAPTER XVI. THE STATUE ON THE PROMONTORY
 CHAPTER XVII. MY FATHER BREATHES, MOVES, AND SPEAKS
 CHAPTER XVIII. WE PASS A DELIGHTFUL EVENING, AND I HAVE A MORNING VISION
 CHAPTER XIX. OUR RETURN HOMEWARD
 CHAPTER XX. NEWS OF A FRESH CONQUEST OF MY FATHER'S
 CHAPTER XXI. A PROMENADE IN BATH
 CHAPTER XXII. CONCLUSION OF THE BATH EPISODE
 CHAPTER XXIII. MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
 CHAPTER XXIV. I MEET THE PRINCESS
 CHAPTER XXV. ON BOARD A YACHT
 CHAPTER XXVI. IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN'S BIRTHPLACE
 CHAPTER XXVII. THE TIME OF ROSES
 CHAPTER XXVIII. OTTILIA
 CHAPTER XXIX. AN EVENING WITH DR. JULIUS VON KARSTEG
 CHAPTER XXX. A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE
 CHAPTER XXXI. PRINCESS OTTILIA'S LETTER
 CHAPTER XXXII. AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO
 CHAPTER XXXIII. WHAT CAME OF A SHILLING
 CHAPTER XXXIV. I GAIN A PERCEPTION OF PRINCELY STATE
 CHAPTER XXXV. THE SCENE IN THE LAKE-PALACE LIBRARY
 CHAPTER XXXVI. HOMEWARD AND HOME AGAIN
 CHAPTER XXXVII. JANET RENOUNCES ME
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. MY BANKERS' BOOK
 CHAPTER XXXIX. I SEE MY FATHER TAKING THE TIDE AND AM CARRIED ON IT MYSELF
 CHAPTER XL. MY FATHER'S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER
 CHAPTER XLI. COMMENCEMENT OF THE SPLENDOURS AND PERPLEXITIES OF MY FATHER'S GRAND PARADE
 CHAPTER XLII. THE MARQUIS OF EDBURY AND HIS PUPPET
 CHAPTER XLIII. I BECOME ONE OF THE CHOSEN OF THE NATION
 CHAPTER XLIV. MY FATHER IS MIRACULOUSLY RELIEVED BY FORTUNE
 CHAPTER XLV. WITHIN AN INCH OF MY LIFE
 CHAPTER XLVI. AMONG GIPSY WOMEN
 CHAPTER XLVII. MY FATHER ACTS THE CHARMER AGAIN
 CHAPTER XLVIII. THE PRINCESS ENTRAPPED
 CHAPTER XLIX. WHICH FORESHADOWS A GENERAL GATHERING
 CHAPTER L. WE ARE ALL IN MY FATHER'S NET
 CHAPTER LI. AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER'S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT
 CHAPTER LII. STRANGE REVELATIONS, AND MY GRANDFATHER HAS HIS LAST OUTBURST
 CHAPTER LIII. THE HEIRESS PROVES THAT SHE INHERITS THE FEUD AND I GO DRIFTING
 CHAPTER LIV. MY RETURN TO ENGLAND
 CHAPTER LV. I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT
 CHAPTER LVI. CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I.
I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION


One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley Grange were
awakened by a ringing of the outer bell and blows upon the great
hall-doors. Squire Beltham was master there: the other members of the
household were, his daughter Dorothy Beltham; a married daughter Mrs.
Richmond; Benjamin Sewis, an old half-caste butler; various domestic
servants; and a little boy, christened Harry Lepel Richmond, the
squire's grandson. Riversley Grange lay in a rich watered hollow of the
Hampshire heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosed brook and pasture,
within view of some of its dependent farms, but out of hail of them or
any dwelling except the stables and the head-gardener's cottage.
Traditions of audacious highwaymen, together with the gloomy
surrounding fir-scenery, kept it alive to fears of solitude and the
night; and there was that in the determined violence of the knocks and
repeated bell-peals which assured all those who had ever listened in
the servants' hall to prognostications of a possible night attack, that
the robbers had come at last most awfully. A crowd of maids gathered
along the upper corridor of the main body of the building: two or three
footmen hung lower down, bold in attitude. Suddenly the noise ended,
and soon after the voice of old Sewis commanded them to scatter away to
their beds; whereupon the footmen took agile leaps to the post of
danger, while the women, in whose bosoms intense curiosity now
supplanted terror, proceeded to a vacant room overlooking the front
entrance, and spied from the window.

Meanwhile Sewis stood by his master's bedside. The squire was a hunter,
of the old sort: a hard rider, deep drinker, and heavy slumberer.
Before venturing to shake his arm Sewis struck a light and flashed it
over the squire's eyelids to make the task of rousing him easier. At
the first touch the squire sprang up, swearing by his Lord Harry he had
just dreamed of fire, and muttering of buckets.

'Sewis! you're the man, are you: where has it broken out?'

'No, sir; no fire,' said Sewis; 'you be cool, sir.'

'Cool, sir! confound it, Sewis, haven't I heard a whole town of
steeples at work? I don't sleep so thick but I can hear, you dog!
Fellow comes here, gives me a start, tells me to be cool; what the
deuce! nobody hurt, then? all right!'

The squire had fallen back on his pillow and was relapsing to sleep.

Sewis spoke impressively: 'There's a gentleman downstairs; a gentleman
downstairs, sir. He has come rather late.'

'Gentleman downstairs come rather late.' The squire recapitulated the
intelligence to possess it thoroughly. 'Rather late, eh? Oh! Shove him
into a bed, and give him hot brandy and water, and be hanged to him!'

Sewis had the office of tempering a severely distasteful announcement
to the squire.

He resumed: 'The gentleman doesn't talk of staying. That is not his
business. It's rather late for him to arrive.'

'Rather late!' roared the squire. 'Why, what's it o'clock?'

Reaching a hand to the watch over his head, he caught sight of the
unearthly hour. 'A quarter to two? Gentleman downstairs? Can't be that
infernal apothecary who broke 's engagement to dine with me last night?
By George, if it is I'll souse him; I'll drench him from head to heel
as though the rascal 'd been drawn through the duck-pond. Two o'clock
in the morning? Why, the man's drunk. Tell him I'm a magistrate, and
I'll commit him, deuce take him; give him fourteen days for a sot;
another fourteen for impudence. I've given a month 'fore now. Comes to
me, a Justice of the peace!—man's mad! Tell him he's in peril of a
lunatic asylum. And doesn't talk of staying? Lift him out o' the house
on the top o' your boot, Sewis, and say it's mine; you've my leave.'

Sewis withdrew a step from the bedside. At a safe distance he fronted
his master steadily; almost admonishingly. 'It's Mr. Richmond, sir,' he
said.

'Mr....' The squire checked his breath. That was a name never uttered
at the Grange. 'The scoundrel?' he inquired harshly, half in a tone of
one assuring himself, and his rigid dropped jaw shut.

The fact had to be denied or affirmed instantly, and Sewis was silent.

Grasping his bedclothes in a lump, the squire cried:

'Downstairs? downstairs, Sewis? You've admitted him into my house?'

'No, sir.'

'You have!'

'He is not in the house, sir.'

'You have! How did you speak to him, then?'

'Out of my window, sir.'

'What place here is the scoundrel soiling now?'

'He is on the doorstep outside the house.'

'Outside, is he? and the door's locked?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Let him rot there!'

By this time the midnight visitor's patience had become exhausted. A
renewal of his clamour for immediate attention fell on the squire's
ear, amazing him to stupefaction at such challengeing insolence.

'Hand me my breeches,' he called to Sewis; 'I can't think brisk out of
my breeches.'

Sewis held the garment ready. The squire jumped from the bed, fuming
speechlessly, chafing at gaiters and braces, cravat and coat, and
allowed his buttons to be fitted neatly on his calves; the hammering at
the hall-door and plucking at the bell going on without intermission.
He wore the aspect of one who assumes a forced composure under the
infliction of outrages on his character in a Court of Law, where he
must of necessity listen and lock his boiling replies within his
indignant bosom.

'Now, Sewis, now my horsewhip,' he remarked, as if it had been a simple
adjunct of his equipment.

'Your hat, sir?'

'My horsewhip, I said.'

'Your hat is in the hall,' Sewis observed gravely.

'I asked you for my horsewhip.'

'That is not to be found anywhere,' said Sewis.

The squire was diverted from his objurgations against this piece of
servitorial defiance by his daughter Dorothy's timid appeal for
permission to come in. Sewis left the room. Presently the squire
descended, fully clad, and breathing sharply from his nostrils.
Servants were warned off out of hearing; none but Sewis stood by.

The squire himself unbolted the door, and threw it open to the limit of
the chain.

'Who's there?' he demanded.

A response followed promptly from outside: 'I take you to be Mr. Harry
Lepel Beltham. Correct me if I err. Accept my apologies for disturbing
you at a late hour of the night, I pray.'

'Your name?'

'Is plain Augustus Fitz-George Roy Richmond at this moment, Mr.
Beltham. You will recognize me better by opening your door entirely:
voices are deceptive. You were born a gentleman, Mr. Beltham, and will
not reduce me to request you to behave like one. I am now in the
position, as it were, of addressing a badger in his den. It is on both
sides unsatisfactory. It reflects egregious discredit upon you, the
householder.'

The squire hastily bade Sewis see that the passages to the sleeping
apartments were barred, and flung the great chain loose. He was acting
under strong control of his temper.

It was a quiet grey night, and as the doors flew open, a largely-built
man, dressed in a high-collared great-coat and fashionable hat of the
time, stood clearly defined to view. He carried a light cane, with the
point of the silver handle against his under lip. There was nothing
formidable in his appearance, and his manner was affectedly affable. He
lifted his hat as soon as he found himself face to face with the
squire, disclosing a partially bald head, though his whiskering was
luxuriant, and a robust condition of manhood was indicated by his erect
attitude and the immense swell of his furred great-coat at the chest.
His features were exceedingly frank and cheerful. From his superior
height, he was enabled to look down quite royally on the man whose
repose he had disturbed.

The following conversation passed between them.

'You now behold who it is, Mr. Beltham, that acknowledges to the
misfortune of arousing you at an unseemly hour—unbetimes, as our
gossips in mother Saxon might say—and with profound regret, sir, though
my habit is to take it lightly.'

'Have you any accomplices lurking about here?'

'I am alone.'

'What's your business?'

'I have no business.'

'You have no business to be here, no. I ask you what's the object of
your visit?'

'Permit me first to speak of the cause of my protracted arrival, sir.
The ridicule of casting it on the post-boys will strike you, Mr.
Beltham, as it does me. Nevertheless, I must do it; I have no resource.
Owing to a rascal of the genus, incontinent in liquor, I have this
night walked seven miles from Ewling. My complaint against him is not
on my own account.'

'What brought you here at all?'

'Can you ask me?'

'I ask you what brought you to my house at all?'

'True, I might have slept at Ewling.'

'Why didn't you?'

'For the reason, Mr. Beltham, which brought me here originally. I could
not wait—not a single minute. So far advanced to the neighbourhood, I
would not be retarded, and I came on. I crave your excuses for the hour
of my arrival. The grounds for my coming at all you will very well
understand, and you will applaud me when I declare to you that I come
to her penitent; to exculpate myself, certainly, but despising
self-justification. I love my wife, Mr. Beltham. Yes; hear me out, sir.
I can point to my unhappy star, and say, blame that more than me. That
star of my birth and most disastrous fortunes should plead on my behalf
to you; to my wife at least it will.'

'You've come to see my daughter Marian, have you?'

'My wife, sir.'

'You don't cross my threshold while I live.'

'You compel her to come out to me?'

'She stays where she is, poor wretch, till the grave takes her. You've
done your worst; be off.'

'Mr. Beltham, I am not to be restrained from the sight of my wife.'

'Scamp!'

'By no scurrilous epithets from a man I am bound to respect will I be
deterred or exasperated.'

'Damned scamp, I say!' The squire having exploded his wrath gave it
free way. 'I've stopped my tongue all this while before a scoundrel ’d
corkscrew the best-bottled temper right or left, go where you will one
end o' the world to the other, by God! And here's a scoundrel stinks of
villany, and I've proclaimed him 'ware my gates as a common trespasser,
and deserves hanging if ever rook did nailed hard and fast to my barn
doors! comes here for my daughter, when he got her by stealing her,
scenting his carcase, and talking 'bout his birth, singing what not
sort o' foreign mewin' stuff, and she found him out a liar and a beast,
by God! And she turned home. My doors are open to my flesh and blood.
And here she halts, I say, 'gainst the law, if the law's against me.
She's crazed: you've made her mad; she knows none of us, not even her
boy. Be off; you've done your worst; the light's gone clean out in her;
and hear me, you Richmond, or Roy, or whatever you call yourself, I
tell you I thank the Lord she has lost her senses. See her or not,
you've no hold on her, and see her you shan't while I go by the name of
a man.'

Mr. Richmond succeeded in preserving an air of serious deliberation
under the torrent of this tremendous outburst, which was marked by
scarce a pause in the delivery.

He said, 'My wife deranged! I might presume it too truly an inherited
disease. Do you trifle with me, sir? Her reason unseated! and can you
pretend to the right of dividing us? If this be as you say—Oh! ten
thousand times the stronger my claim, my absolute claim, to cherish
her. Make way for me, Mr. Beltham. I solicit humbly the holiest
privilege sorrow can crave of humanity. My wife! my wife! Make way for
me, sir.'

His figure was bent to advance. The squire shouted an order to Sewis to
run round to the stables and slip the dogs loose.

'Is it your final decision?' Mr. Richmond asked.

'Damn your fine words! Yes, it is. I keep my flock clear of a foul
sheep.'

'Mr. Beltham, I implore you, be merciful. I submit to any conditions:
only let me see her. I will walk the park till morning, but say that an
interview shall be granted in the morning. Frankly, sir, it is not my
intention to employ force: I throw myself utterly on your mercy. I love
the woman; I have much to repent of. I see her, and I go; but once I
must see her. So far I also speak positively.'

'Speak as positively as you like,' said the squire.

'By the laws of nature and the laws of man, Marian Richmond is mine to
support and comfort, and none can hinder me, Mr. Beltham; none, if I
resolve to take her to myself.'

'Can't they!' said the squire.

'A curse be on him, heaven's lightnings descend on him, who keeps
husband from wife in calamity!'

The squire whistled for his dogs.

As if wounded to the quick by this cold-blooded action, Mr. Richmond
stood to his fullest height.

'Nor, sir, on my application during to-morrow's daylight shall I see
her?'

'Nor, sir, on your application'—the squire drawled in uncontrollable
mimicking contempt of the other's florid forms of speech, ending in his
own style,—'no, you won't.'

'You claim a paternal right to refuse me: my wife is your child. Good.
I wish to see my son.'

On that point the squire was equally decided. 'You can't. He's asleep.'

'I insist.'

'Nonsense: I tell you he's a-bed and asleep.'

'I repeat, I insist.'

'When the boy's fast asleep, man!'

'The boy is my flesh and blood. You have spoken for your daughter—I
speak for my son. I will see him, though I have to batter at your doors
till sunrise.'

Some minutes later the boy was taken out of his bed by his aunt
Dorothy, who dressed him by the dark window-light, crying bitterly,
while she said, 'Hush, hush!' and fastened on his small garments
between tender huggings of his body and kissings of his cheeks. He was
told that he had nothing to be afraid of. A gentleman wanted to see
him: nothing more. Whether the gentleman was a good gentleman, and not
a robber, he could not learn but his aunt Dorothy, having wrapped him
warm in shawl and comforter, and tremblingly tied his hat-strings under
his chin, assured him, with convulsive caresses, that it would soon be
over, and he would soon be lying again snug and happy in his dear
little bed. She handed him to Sewis on the stairs, keeping his fingers
for an instant to kiss them: after which, old Sewis, the lord of the
pantry, where all sweet things were stored, deposited him on the floor
of the hall, and he found himself facing the man of the night. It
appeared to him that the stranger was of enormous size, like the giants
of fairy books: for as he stood a little out of the doorway there was a
peep of night sky and trees behind him, and the trees looked very much
smaller, and hardly any sky was to be seen except over his shoulders.

The squire seized one of the boy's hands to present him and retain him
at the same time: but the stranger plucked him from his grandfather's
hold, and swinging him high, exclaimed, 'Here he is! This is Harry
Richmond. He has grown a grenadier.'

'Kiss the little chap and back to bed with him,' growled the squire.

The boy was heartily kissed and asked if he had forgotten his papa. He
replied that he had no papa: he had a mama and a grandpapa. The
stranger gave a deep groan.

'You see what you have done; you have cut me off from my own,' he said
terribly to the squire; but tried immediately to soothe the urchin with
nursery talk and the pats on the shoulder which encourage a little boy
to grow fast and tall. 'Four years of separation,' he resumed, 'and my
son taught to think that he has no father. By heavens! it is infamous,
it is a curst piece of inhumanity. Mr. Beltham, if I do not see my
wife, I carry off my son.'

'You may ask till you're hoarse, you shall never see her in this house
while I am here to command,' said the squire.

'Very well; then Harry Richmond changes homes. I take him. The affair
is concluded.'

'You take him from his mother?' the squire sang out.

'You swear to me she has lost her wits; she cannot suffer. I can. I
shall not expect from you, Mr. Beltham, the minutest particle of
comprehension of a father's feelings. You are earthy; you are an
animal.'

The squire saw that he was about to lift the boy, and said, 'Stop,
never mind that. Stop, look at the case. You can call again to-morrow,
and you can see me and talk it over.'

'Shall I see my wife?'

'No, you shan't.'

'You remain faithful to your word, sir, do you?'

'I do.'

'Then I do similarly.'

'What! Stop! Not to take a child like that out of a comfortable house
at night in Winter, man?'

'Oh, the night is temperate and warm; he shall not remain in a house
where his father is dishonoured.'

'Stop! not a bit of it,' cried the squire. 'No one speaks of you. I
give you my word, you're never mentioned by man, woman or child in the
house.'

'Silence concerning a father insinuates dishonour, Mr. Beltham.'

'Damn your fine speeches, and keep your blackguardly hands off that
boy,' the squire thundered. 'Mind, if you take him, he goes for good.
He doesn't get a penny from me if you have the bringing of him up.
You've done for him, if you decide that way. He may stand here a beggar
in a stolen coat like you, and I won't own him. Here, Harry, come to
me; come to your grandad.'

Mr. Richmond caught the boy just when he was turning to run.

'That gentleman,' he said, pointing to the squire, 'is your grandpapa.
I am your papa. You must learn at any cost to know and love your papa.
If I call for you to-morrow or next day they will have played tricks
with Harry Richmond, and hid him. Mr. Beltham, I request you, for the
final time, to accord me your promise observe, I accept your
promise—that I shall, at my demand, to-morrow or the next day, obtain
an interview with my wife.'

The squire coughed out an emphatic 'Never!' and fortified it with an
oath as he repeated it upon a fuller breath.

'Sir, I will condescend to entreat you to grant this permission,' said
Mr. Richmond, urgently.

'No, never: I won't!' rejoined the squire, red in the face from a fit
of angry coughing. 'I won't; but stop, put down that boy; listen to me,
you Richmond! I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll—if you swear on a Bible,
like a cadger before a bench of magistrates, you'll never show your
face within a circuit o' ten miles hereabouts, and won't trouble the
boy if you meet him, or my daughter or me, or any one of us—hark ye,
I'll do this: let go the boy, and I'll give ye five hundred—I'll give
ye a cheque on my banker for a thousand pounds; and, hark me out, you
do this, you swear, as I said, on the servants' Bible, in the presence
of my butler and me, “Strike you dead as Ananias and t' other one if
you don't keep to it,” do that now, here, on the spot, and I'll engage
to see you paid fifty pounds a year into the bargain. Stop! and I'll
pay your debts under two or three hundred. For God's sake, let go the
boy! You shall have fifty guineas on account this minute. Let go the
boy! And your son—there, I call him your son—your son, Harry Richmond,
shall inherit from me; he shall have Riversley and the best part of my
property, if not every bit of it. Is it a bargain? Will you swear?
Don't, and the boy's a beggar, he's a stranger here as much as you.
Take him, and by the Lord, you ruin him. There now, never mind, stay,
down with him. He's got a cold already; ought to be in his bed; let the
boy down!'

'You offer me money,' Mr. Richmond answered. 'That is one of the
indignities belonging to a connection with a man like you. You would
have me sell my son. To see my afflicted wife I would forfeit my
heart's yearnings for my son; your money, sir, I toss to the winds; and
I am under the necessity of informing you that I despise and loathe
you. I shrink from the thought of exposing my son to your besotted
selfish example. The boy is mine; I have him, and he shall traverse the
wilderness with me. By heaven! his destiny is brilliant. He shall be
hailed for what he is, the rightful claimant of a place among the
proudest in the land; and mark me, Mr. Beltham, obstinate sensual old
man that you are! I take the boy, and I consecrate my life to the duty
of establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if you
live and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig's
head to the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,—a common
country squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we have
mixed ours—and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on him—when
you in your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry
Richmond.'

The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to
utter. He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy
about to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust a
delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips. Then, after some
moments of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly
and gazed down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his
eyes along the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee and
swaddled the boy in the folds of the shawl. Raising him in a
business-like way, he settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across
gravel-walk and lawn, like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the
whip has been applied.

The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and there
a light-blue space of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze smelt
fresh of roots and heath. It was more a May-night than one of February.
So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch and
fir-tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy's terrors were
overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before been
out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs
were not loud. On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began,
he heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman's voice that
he knew to be his aunt Dorothy's. It came after him only once: 'Harry
Richmond'; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park, among the
hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward
London. Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high and
nodded a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one
another; and his perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy
sugarplums, notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to
prognosticate hopefully of his future wisdom. So, when obedient to
command he had given his father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his
shoulder, ceasing to know that he was a wandering infant: and, if I
remember rightly, he dreamed he was in a ship of cinnamon-wood upon a
sea that rolled mighty, but smooth immense broad waves, and tore thing
from thing without a sound or a hurt.




CHAPTER II.
AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT


That night stands up without any clear traces about it or near it, like
the brazen castle of romance round which the sea-tide flows. My father
must have borne me miles along the road; he must have procured food for
me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead and drinking new milk,
and by-and-by hearing a roar of voices or vehicles, and seeing a dog
that went alone through crowded streets without a master, doing as he
pleased, and stopping every other dog he met. He took his turning, and
my father and I took ours. We were in a house that, to my senses, had
the smell of dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors were
painted black, and shut with a bang. Italian organ-men and milk-men
paraded the street regularly, and made it sound hollow to their music.
Milk, and no cows anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances
among them; my thoughts were occupied by the singularity of such
things.

My father could soon make me forget that I was transplanted; he could
act dog, tame rabbit, fox, pony, and a whole nursery collection alive,
but he was sometimes absent for days, and I was not of a temper to be
on friendly terms with those who were unable to captivate my
imagination as he had done. When he was at home I rode him all round
the room and upstairs to bed, I lashed him with a whip till he
frightened me, so real was his barking; if I said 'Menagerie' he became
a caravan of wild beasts; I undid a button of his waistcoat, and it was
a lion that made a spring, roaring at me; I pulled his coat-tails and
off I went tugging at an old bear that swung a hind leg as he turned,
in the queerest way, and then sat up and beating his breast sent out a
mew-moan. Our room was richer to me than all the Grange while these
performances were going forward. His monkey was almost as wonderful as
his bear, only he was too big for it, and was obliged to aim at reality
in his representation of this animal by means of a number of breakages;
a defect that brought our landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my
father's companionship caused me to suffer proportionately in his
absence. During that period of solitude, my nursemaid had to order me
to play, and I would stumble about and squat in the middle of the
floor, struck suddenly by the marvel of the difference between my
present and my other home. My father entered into arrangements with a
Punch and Judy man for him to pay me regular morning visits opposite
our window; yet here again his genius defeated his kind intentions; for
happening once to stand by my side during the progress of the show, he
made it so vivid to me by what he said and did, that I saw no fun in it
without him: I used to dread the heralding crow of Punch if he was
away, and cared no longer for wooden heads being knocked ever so hard.

On Sundays we walked to the cathedral, and this was a day with a
delight of its own for me. He was never away on the Sunday. Both of us
attired in our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my
father led me before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of
British victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention.
I understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we
remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and
dropped his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce
Nelson's name or some other great man's and this recurred regularly.
'What are we for now?' he would ask me as we left our house. I had to
decide whether we took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do
with capricious resolution. We were one Sunday for Shakespeare; another
for Nelson or Pitt. 'Nelson, papa,' was my most frequent rejoinder, and
he never dissented, but turned his steps toward Nelson's cathedral
dome, and uncovered his head there, and said: 'Nelson, then, to-day';
and we went straight to his monument to perform the act of homage. I
chose Nelson in preference to the others because near bed-time in the
evening my father told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither
Pitt nor Shakespeare lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge
white bear on the ice to make himself interesting. I named them
occasionally out of compassion, and to please my father, who said that
they ought to have a turn. They were, he told me, in the habit of
paying him a visit, whenever I had particularly neglected them, to
learn the grounds for my disregard of their claims, and they urged him
to intercede with me, and imparted many of their unpublished
adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them a chance on the
following Sunday.

'Great Will,' my father called Shakespeare, and 'Slender Billy,' Pitt.
The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over
the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put
an extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody
groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful
mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but
everybody in the park called him, 'Father William'; and when he wanted
to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory
deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be
steeped in the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the
carcase; Hamlet (the fact was impressed on me) offered him a
three-legged stool; and a number of kings and knights and ladies lit
their torches from Bardolph; and away they flew, distracting the
keepers and leaving Will and his troop to the deer. That poor thing
died from a different weapon at each recital, though always with a flow
of blood and a successful dash of his antlers into Falstaff; and to
hear Falstaff bellow! But it was mournful to hear how sorry Great Will
was over the animal he had slain. He spoke like music. I found it
pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by
Bardolph's nose. When I was just bursting out crying—for the deer's
tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at his side; he had
little ones at home—Great Will remembered his engagement to sell
Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew should eat of
it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he
said the Jew would not see the difference: Falstaff only got off by
hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life would make
him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick.

My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air,
and such liveliness—he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King
Lear tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of
Falstaff—that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them,
which was better than understanding them. I required some help from him
to see that Hamlet's offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment
of the chase, was laughable. He taught me what to think of it by
pitching Great Will's voice high, and Hamlet's very low. By degrees I
got some unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.

There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything
under eight or ten years old. He could guess on Saturday whether I
should name William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions,
'Slender Billy,' as I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up
for the dulness of his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for
which, my father told me solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his
day a passion. If I named him, my father would say, 'W. P., otherwise
S. B., was born in the year so-and-so; now,' and he went to the
cupboard, 'in the name of Politics, take this and meditate upon him.'
The shops being all shut on Sunday, he certainly bought it,
anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as soon as the tart
appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his repeating a couplet,

'Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry jam,
When he heard they had taken Seringapatam.'


At any rate, the rumour of his having done so, at periods of strong
excitement, led to the inexplicable display of foresight on my father's
part.

My meditations upon Pitt were, under this influence, favourable to the
post of a Prime Minister, but it was merely appetite that induced me to
choose him; I never could imagine a grandeur in his office,
notwithstanding my father's eloquent talk of ruling a realm,
shepherding a people, hurling British thunderbolts. The day's
discipline was, that its selected hero should reign the undisputed
monarch of it, so when I was for Pitt, I had my tart as he used to have
it, and no story, for he had none, and I think my idea of the ruler of
a realm presented him to me as a sort of shadow about a pastrycook's
shop. But I surprised people by speaking of him. I made remarks to our
landlady which caused her to throw up her hands and exclaim that I was
astonishing. She would always add a mysterious word or two in the
hearing of my nursemaid or any friend of hers who looked into my room
to see me. After my father had got me forward with instructions on the
piano, and exercises in early English history and the book of the
Peerage, I became the wonder of the house. I was put up on a stool to
play 'In my Cottage near a Wood,' or 'Cherry Ripe,' and then, to show
the range of my accomplishments, I was asked, 'And who married the
Dowager Duchess of Dewlap?' and I answered, 'John Gregg Wetherall,
Esquire, and disgraced the family.' Then they asked me how I accounted
for her behaviour.

'It was because the Duke married a dairymaid,' I replied, always
tossing up my chin at that. My father had concocted the questions and
prepared me for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon
his visitors and the landlady's. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to
her invariable whisper on these occasions. 'Blood Rile,' she said; and
her friends all said 'No!' like the run of a finger down a
fiddlestring.

A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him
out for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this
gentleman entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and knees,
and abused him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he
introduced him to me as Shylock's great-great-great-grandson, and said
that Shylock was satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two
hundred pounds, or else all his body: and this, he said, came of the
emigration of the family from Venice to England. My father only seemed
angry, for he went off with Shylock's very great grandson arm-in-arm,
exclaiming, 'To the Rialto!' When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor,
she said, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! then I'm afraid your sweet papa won't
return very soon, my pretty pet.' We waited a number of days, until
Mrs. Waddy received a letter from him. She came full-dressed into my
room, requesting me to give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on
while she arranged her blue bonnet at the glass. The bonnet would not
fix in its place. At last she sank down crying in a chair, and was all
brown silk, and said that how to appear before a parcel of dreadful
men, and perhaps a live duke into the bargain, was more than she knew,
and more than could be expected of a lone widow woman. 'Not for
worlds!' she answered my petition to accompany her. She would not, she
said, have me go to my papa there for anything on earth; my papa would
perish at the sight of me; I was not even to wish to go. And then she
exclaimed, 'Oh, the blessed child's poor papa!' and that people were
cruel to him, and would never take into account his lovely temper, and
that everybody was his enemy, when he ought to be sitting with the
highest in the land. I had realized the extremity of my forlorn state
on a Sunday that passed empty of my father, which felt like his having
gone for ever. My nursemaid came in to assist in settling Mrs. Waddy's
bonnet above the six crisp curls, and while they were about it I sat
quiet, plucking now and then at the brown silk, partly to beg to go
with it, partly in jealousy and love at the thought of its seeing him
from whom I was so awfully separated. Mrs. Waddy took fresh kisses off
my lips, assuring me that my father would have them in twenty minutes,
and I was to sit and count the time. My nursemaid let her out. I
pretended to be absorbed in counting, till I saw Mrs. Waddy pass by the
window. My heart gave a leap of pain. I found the street-door open and
no one in the passage, and I ran out, thinking that Mrs. Waddy would be
obliged to take me if she discovered me by her side in the street.

I was by no means disconcerted at not seeing her immediately. Running
on from one street to another, I took the turnings with unhesitating
boldness, as if I had a destination in view. I must have been out near
an hour before I understood that Mrs. Waddy had eluded me; so I
resolved to enjoy the shop-windows with the luxurious freedom of one
whose speculations on those glorious things all up for show are no
longer distracted by the run of time and a nursemaid. Little more than
a glance was enough, now that I knew I could stay as long as I liked.
If I stopped at all, it was rather to exhibit the bravado of liberty
than to distinguish any particular shop with my preference: all were
equally beautiful; so were the carriages; so were the people. Ladies
frequently turned to look at me, perhaps because I had no covering on
my head; but they did not interest me in the least. I should have been
willing to ask them or any one where the Peerage lived, only my mind
was quite full, and I did not care. I felt sure that a great deal of
walking would ultimately bring me to St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey;
to anything else I was indifferent.

Toward sunset my frame was struck as with an arrow by the sensations of
hunger on passing a cook's-shop. I faltered along, hoping to reach a
second one, without knowing why I had dragged my limbs from the first.
There was a boy in ragged breeches, no taller than myself, standing
tiptoe by the window of a very large and brilliant pastry-cook's. He
persuaded me to go into the shop and ask for a cake. I thought it
perfectly natural to do so, being hungry; but when I reached the
counter and felt the size of the shop, I was abashed, and had to repeat
the nature of my petition twice to the young woman presiding there.

'Give you a cake, little boy?' she said. 'We don't give cakes, we sell
them.'

'Because I am hungry,' said I, pursuing my request.

Another young woman came, laughing and shaking lots of ringlets.

'Don't you see he's not a common boy? he doesn't whine,' she remarked,
and handed me a stale bun, saying, 'Here, Master Charles, and you
needn't say thank you.'

'My name is Harry Richmond, and I thank you very much,' I replied.

I heard her say, as I went out, 'You can see he's a gentleman's son.'
The ragged boy was awaiting me eagerly. 'Gemini! you're a lucky one,'
he cried; 'here, come along, curly-poll.' I believe that I meant to
share the bun with him, but of course he could not be aware of my
beneficent intentions: so he treated me as he thought I was for
treating him, and making one snatch at the bun, ran off cramming it
into his mouth. I stood looking at any hand. I learnt in that instant
what thieving was, and begging, and hunger, for I would have perished
rather than have asked for another cake, and as I yearned for it in
absolute want of food, the boy's ungenerous treatment of me came down
in a cloud on my reason. I found myself being led through the crush of
people, by an old gentleman, to whom I must have related an
extraordinary rigmarole. He shook his head, saying that I was
unintelligible; but the questions he put to me, 'Why had I no hat on in
the open street?—Where did my mother live?—What was I doing out alone
in London?' were so many incitements to autobiographical composition to
an infant mind, and I tumbled out my history afresh each time that he
spoke. He led me into a square, stooping his head to listen all the
while; but when I perceived that we had quitted the region of shops I
made myself quite intelligible by stopping short and crying: 'I am so
hungry.' He nodded and said, 'It's no use cross-examining an empty
stomach. You'll do me the favour to dine with me, my little man. We'll
talk over your affairs by-and-by.'

My alarm at having left the savoury street of shops was not soothed
until I found myself sitting at table with him, and a nice young lady,
and an old one who wore a cap, and made loud remarks on my garments and
everything I did. I was introduced to them as the little boy dropped
from the sky. The old gentleman would not allow me to be questioned
before I had eaten. It was a memorable feast. I had soup, fish, meat,
and pastry, and, for the first time in my life, a glass of wine. How
they laughed to see me blink and cough after I had swallowed half the
glass like water. At once my tongue was unloosed. I seemed to rise
right above the roofs of London, beneath which I had been but a
wandering atom a few minutes ago. I talked of my wonderful father, and
Great Will, and Pitt, and the Peerage. I amazed them with my knowledge.
When I finished a long recital of Great Will's chase of the deer, by
saying that I did not care about politics (I meant, in my own mind,
that Pitt was dull in comparison), they laughed enormously, as if I had
fired them off. 'Do you know what you are, sir?' said the old
gentleman; he had frowning eyebrows and a merry mouth 'you're a comical
character.'

I felt interested in him, and asked him what he was. He informed me
that he was a lawyer, and ready to be pantaloon to my clown, if I would
engage him.

'Are you in the Peerage?' said I.

'Not yet,' he replied.

'Well, then,' said I, 'I know nothing about you.'

The young lady screamed with laughter. 'Oh, you funny little boy; you
killing little creature!' she said, and coming round to me, lifted me
out of my chair, and wanted to know if I knew how to kiss.

'Oh, yes; I've been taught that,' said I, giving the salute without
waiting for the invitation; 'but,' I added, 'I don't care about it
much.'

She was indignant, and told me she was going to be offended, so I let
her understand that I liked being kissed and played with in the morning
before I was up, and if she would come to my house ever so early, she
would find me lying next the wall and ready for her.

'And who lies outside?' she asked.

'That's my papa,' I was beginning to say, but broke the words with a
sob, for I seemed to be separated from him now by the sea itself.

They petted me tenderly. My story was extracted by alternate leading
questions from the old gentleman and timely caresses from the ladies. I
could tell them everything except the name of the street where I lived.
My midnight excursion from the house of my grandfather excited them
chiefly; also my having a mother alive who perpetually fanned her face
and wore a ball-dress and a wreath; things that I remembered of my
mother. The ladies observed that it was clear I was a romantic child. I
noticed that the old gentleman said 'Humph,' very often, and his
eyebrows were like a rook's nest in a tree when I spoke of my father
walking away with Shylock's descendant and not since returning to me. A
big book was fetched out of his library, in which he read my
grandfather's name. I heard him mention it aloud. I had been placed on
a stool beside a tea-tray near the fire, and there I saw the old red
house of Riversley, and my mother dressed in white, and my aunt
Dorothy; and they all complained that I had ceased to love them, and
must go to bed, to which I had no objection. Somebody carried me up and
undressed me, and promised me a great game of kissing in the morning.

The next day in the strange house I heard that the old gentleman had
sent one of his clerks down to my grandfather at Riversley, and
communicated with the constables in London; and, by-and-by, Mrs. Waddy
arrived, having likewise visited those authorities, one of whom
supported her claims upon me. But the old gentleman wished to keep me
until his messenger returned from Riversley. He made all sorts of
pretexts. In the end, he insisted on seeing my father, and Mrs. Waddy,
after much hesitation, and even weeping, furnished the address: upon
hearing which, spoken aside to him, he said, 'I thought so.' Mrs. Waddy
entreated him to be respectful to my father, who was, she declared, his
superior, and, begging everybody's pardon present, the superior of us
all, through no sin of his own, that caused him to be so unfortunate;
and a real Christian and pattern, in spite of outsides, though as true
a gentleman as ever walked, and by rights should be amongst the
highest. She repeated 'amongst the highest' reprovingly, with the ears
of barley in her blue bonnet shaking, and her hands clasped tight in
her lap. Old Mr. Bannerbridge (that was the old gentleman's name) came
back very late from his visit to my father, so late that he said it
would be cruel to let me go out in the street after my bed-time. Mrs.
Waddy consented to my remaining, on the condition of my being
surrendered to her at nine o'clock, and no later, the following
morning.

I was assured by Mr. Bannerbridge that my father's health and appetite
were excellent; he gave me a number of unsatisfying messages, all the
rest concerning his interview he whispered to his daughter and his
sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news
from Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away
by the friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was
disapproved of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying
between two battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand.
There was a great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to
her appointed hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a
whole day in different conveyances, the last of which landed us miles
away from London, at the gates of an old drooping, mossed and streaked
farmhouse, that was like a wall-flower in colour.




CHAPTER III.
DIPWELL FARM


In rain or in sunshine this old farmhouse had a constant resemblance to
a wall-flower; and it had the same moist earthy smell, except in the
kitchen, where John and Martha Thresher lived, apart from their
furniture. All the fresh eggs, and the butter stamped, with three bees,
and the pots of honey, the fowls, and the hare lifted out of the hamper
by his hind legs, and the country loaves smelling heavenly, which used
to come to Mrs. Waddy's address in London, and appear on my father's
table, were products of Dipwell farm, and presents from her sister,
Martha Thresher. On receiving this information I felt at home in a
moment, and asked right off, 'How long am I to stay here?—Am I going
away tomorrow?—What's going to be done with me?' The women found these
questions of a youthful wanderer touching. Between kissings and
promises of hens to feed, and eggs that were to come of it, I settled
into contentment. A strong impression was made on me by Mrs. Waddy's
saying, 'Here, Master Harry, your own papa will come for you; and you
may be sure he will, for I have his word he will, and he's not one to
break it, unless his country's against him; and for his darling boy
he'd march against cannons. So here you'll sit and wait for him, won't
you?' I sat down immediately, looking up. Mrs. Waddy and Mrs. Thresher
raised their hands. I had given them some extraordinary proof of my
love for my father. The impression I received was, that sitting was the
thing to conjure him to me.

'Where his heart's not concerned,' Mrs. Waddy remarked of me
flatteringly, 'he's shrewd as a little schoolmaster.'

'He've a bird's-nesting eye,' said Mrs. Thresher, whose face I was
studying.

John Thresher wagered I would be a man before either of them reached
that goal. But whenever he spoke he suffered correction on account of
his English.

'More than his eating and his drinking, that child's father worrits
about his learning to speak the language of a British gentleman,' Mrs.
Waddy exclaimed. 'Before that child your _h_'s must be like the panting
of an engine—to please his father. He'd stop me carrying the
dinner-tray on meat-dish hot, and I'm to repeat what I said, to make
sure the child haven't heard anything ungrammatical. The child's
nursemaid he'd lecture so, the poor girl would come down to me ready to
bend double, like a bundle of nothing, his observations so took the
pride out of her. That's because he's a father who knows his duty to
the child:—“Child!” says he, “man, ma'am.” It's just as you, John, when
you sow your seed you think of your harvest. So don't take it ill of
me, John; I beg of you be careful of your English. Turn it over as
you're about to speak.'

'Change loads on the road, you mean,' said John Thresher. 'Na, na, he's
come to settle nigh a weedy field, if you like, but his crop ain't nigh
reaping yet. Hark you, Mary Waddy, who're a widde, which's as much as
say, an unocc'pied mind, there's cockney, and there's country, and
there's school. Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sediment.
Now, yon's my view.

His wife and Mrs. Waddy said reflectively, in a breath, 'True!'

'Drink or no, that's the trick o' brewery,' he added.

They assented. They began praising him, too, like meek creatures.

'What John says is worth listening to, Mary. You may be over-careful. A
stew's a stew, and not a boiling to shreds, and you want a steady fire,
and not a furnace.'

'Oh, I quite agree with John, Martha: we must take the good and the
evil in a world like this.'

'Then I'm no scholar, and you're at ease,' said John.

Mrs. Waddy put her mouth to his ear.

Up went his eyebrows, wrinkling arches over a petrified stare.

In some way she had regained her advantage. 'Art sure of it?' he
inquired.

'Pray, don't offend me by expressing a doubt of it,' she replied,
bowing.

John Thresher poised me in the very centre of his gaze. He declared he
would never have guessed that, and was reproved, inasmuch as he might
have guessed it. He then said that I could not associate with any of
the children thereabout, and my dwelling in the kitchen was not to be
thought of. The idea of my dwelling in the kitchen seemed to be a
serious consideration with Mrs. Martha likewise. I was led into the
rooms of state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the
kitchen, and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and
supping with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my
father across the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and
not be impatient, is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my
father's absence. I knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him.
He had the world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river
flowed from the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long
meadows. In Winter the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying.
On the other side of the copses bounding our home, there was a park
containing trees old as the History of England, John Thresher said, and
the thought of their venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could
not tell me whether he meant as old as the book of English History; he
fancied he did, for the furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but
no one exactly could swear when that (the book) was put together. At my
suggestion, he fixed the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period
of heavy ploughing. Thus begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as
a place of extreme baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my
Harold. These heroes lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently
awaiting the arrival of my father. He sent me once a glorious letter.
Mrs. Waddy took one of John Thresher's pigeons to London, and in the
evening we beheld the bird cut the sky like an arrow, bringing round
his neck a letter warm from him I loved. Planet communicating with
planet would be not more wonderful to men than words of his to me,
travelling in such a manner. I went to sleep, and awoke imagining the
bird bursting out of heaven.

Meanwhile there was an attempt to set me moving again. A strange young
man was noticed in the neighbourhood of the farm, and he accosted me at
Leckham fair. 'I say, don't we know one another? How about your
grandfather the squire, and your aunt, and Mr. Bannerbridge? I've got
news for you.'

Not unwilling to hear him, I took his hand, leaving my companion, the
miller's little girl, Mabel Sweetwinter, at a toy-stand, while Bob, her
brother and our guardian, was shying sticks in a fine attitude. 'Yes,
and your father, too,' said the young man; 'come along and see him; you
can run?' I showed him how fast. We were pursued by Bob, who fought for
me, and won me, and my allegiance instantly returned to him. He carried
me almost the whole of the way back to Dipwell. Women must feel for the
lucky heroes who win them, something of what I felt for mine; I kissed
his bloody face, refusing to let him wipe it. John Thresher said to me
at night, 'Ay, now you've got a notion of boxing; and will you believe
it, Master Harry, there's people fools enough to want to tread that
ther' first-rate pastime under foot? I speak truth, and my word for 't,
they'd better go in petticoats. Let clergymen preach as in duty bound;
you and I'll uphold a manful sport, we will, and a cheer for Bob!'

He assured me, and he had my entire faith, that boxing was England's
natural protection from the foe. The comfort of having one like Bob to
defend our country from invasion struck me as inexpressible. Lighted by
John Thresher's burning patriotism, I entered the book of the History
of England at about the pace of a carthorse, with a huge waggon at my
heels in the shape of John. There was no moving on until he was filled.
His process of receiving historical knowledge was to fight over again
the personages who did injury to our honour as a nation, then shake
hands and be proud of them. 'For where we ain't quite successful we're
cunning,' he said; 'and we not being able to get rid of William the
Conqueror, because he's got a will of his own and he won't budge, why,
we takes and makes him one of ourselves; and no disgrace in that, I
should hope! He paid us a compliment, don't you see, Master Harry? he
wanted to be an Englishman. “Can you this?” says we, sparrin' up to
him. “Pretty middlin',” says he, “and does it well.” “Well then,” says
we, “then you're one of us, and we'll beat the world”; and did so.'

John Thresher had a laborious mind; it cost him beads on his forehead
to mount to these heights of meditation. He told me once that he
thought one's country was like one's wife: you were born in the first,
and married to the second, and had to learn all about them afterwards,
ay, and make the best of them. He recommended me to mix, strain, and
throw away the sediment, for that was the trick o' brewery. Every
puzzle that beset him in life resolved to this cheerful precept, the
value of which, he said, was shown by clear brown ale, the drink of the
land. Even as a child I felt that he was peculiarly an Englishman.
Tales of injustice done on the Niger river would flush him in a heat of
wrath till he cried out for fresh taxes to chastise the villains. Yet
at the sight of the beggars at his gates he groaned at the taxes
existing, and enjoined me to have pity on the poor taxpayer when I lent
a hand to patch the laws. I promised him I would unreservedly, with a
laugh, but with a sincere intention to legislate in a direct manner on
his behalf. He, too, though he laughed, thanked me kindly.

I was clad in black for my distant mother. Mrs. Waddy brought down a
young man from London to measure me, so that my mourning attire might
be in the perfect cut of fashion. 'The child's papa would strip him if
he saw him in a country tailor's funeral suit,' she said, and seemed to
blow a wind of changes on me that made me sure my father had begun to
stir up his part of the world. He sent me a prayer in his own
handwriting to say for my mother in heaven. I saw it flying up between
black edges whenever I shut my eyes. Martha Thresher dosed me for
liver. Mrs. Waddy found me pale by the fireside, and prescribed iron.
Both agreed upon high-feeding, and the apothecary agreed with both in
everything, which reconciled them, for both good women loved me so
heartily they were near upon disputing over the medicines I was to
consume.

Under such affectionate treatment I betrayed the alarming symptom that
my imagination was set more on my mother than on my father: I could not
help thinking that for any one to go to heaven was stranger than to
drive to Dipwell, and I had this idea when my father was clasping me in
his arms; but he melted it like snow off the fields. He came with
postillions in advance of him wearing crape rosettes, as did the
horses. We were in the cricket-field, where Dipwell was playing its
first match of the season, and a Dipwell lad, furious to see the
elevens commit such a breach of the rules and decency as to troop away
while the game was hot, and surround my father, flung the cricket-ball
into the midst and hit two or three of the men hard. My father had to
shield him from the consequences. He said he liked that boy; and he
pleaded for him so winningly and funnily that the man who was hurt most
laughed loudest.

Standing up in the carriage, and holding me by the hand, he addressed
them by their names: 'Sweetwinter, I thank you for your attention to my
son; and you, Thribble; and you, my man; and you, Baker; Rippengale,
and you; and you, Jupp'; as if he knew them personally. It was true he
nodded at random. Then he delivered a short speech, and named himself a
regular subscriber to their innocent pleasures. He gave them money, and
scattered silver coin among the boys and girls, and praised John
Thresher, and Martha, his wife, for their care of me, and pointing to
the chimneys of the farm, said that the house there was holy to him
from henceforth, and he should visit it annually if possible, but
always in the month of May, and in the shape of his subscription, as
certain as the cowslip. The men, after their fit of cheering, appeared
unwilling to recommence their play, so he alighted and delivered the
first ball, and then walked away with my hand in his, saying:

'Yes, my son, we will return to them tenfold what they have done for
you. The eleventh day of May shall be a day of pleasure for Dipwell
while I last, and you will keep it in memory of me when I am gone. And
now to see the bed you have slept in.'

Martha Thresher showed him the bed, showed him flowers I had planted,
and a Spanish chestnut tree just peeping.

'Ha!' said he, beaming at every fresh sight of my doings: 'madam, I am
your life-long debtor and friend!' He kissed her on the cheek.

John Thresher cried out: 'Why, dame, you trembles like a maid.'

She spoke very faintly, and was red in the face up to the time of our
departure. John stood like a soldier. We drove away from a cheering
crowd of cricketers and farm-labourers, as if discharged from a great
gun. 'A royal salvo!' said my father, and asked me earnestly whether I
had forgotten to reward and take a particular farewell of any one of my
friends. I told him I had forgotten no one, and thought it was true,
until on our way up the sandy lane, which offered us a last close view
of the old wall-flower farm front, I saw little Mabel Sweetwinter,
often my playfellow and bedfellow, a curly-headed girl, who would have
danced on Sunday for a fairing, and eaten gingerbread nuts during a
ghost-story. She was sitting by a furze-bush in flower, cherishing in
her lap a lamb that had been worried. She looked half up at me, and
kept looking so, but would not nod. Then good-bye, thought I, and
remembered her look when I had forgotten that of all the others.




CHAPTER IV.
I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR


Though I had not previously seen a postillion in my life, I gazed on
the pair bobbing regularly on their horses before me, without a thought
upon the marvel of their sudden apparition and connection with my
fortunes. I could not tire of hearing the pleasant music of the many
feet at the trot, and tried to explain to my father that the men going
up and down made it like a piano that played of itself. He laughed and
kissed me; he remembered having once shown me the inside of a piano
when the keys were knocked. My love for him as we drove into London had
a recognized footing: I perceived that he was my best friend and only
true companion, besides his being my hero. The wicked men who had
parted us were no longer able to do harm, he said. I forgot, in my
gladness at their defeat, to ask what had become of Shylock's
descendant.

Mrs. Waddy welcomed us when we alighted. Do not imagine that it was at
the door of her old house. It was in a wide street opening on a
splendid square, and pillars were before the houses, and inside there
was the enchantment of a little fountain playing thin as whipcord,
among ferns, in a rock-basin under a window that glowed with kings of
England, copied from boys' history books. All the servants were drawn
up in the hall to do homage to me. They seemed less real and living
than the wonder of the sweet-smelling chairs, the birds, and the
elegant dogs. Richest of treats, a monkey was introduced to me. 'It's
your papa's whim,' Mrs. Waddy said, resignedly; 'he says he must have
his jester. Indeed it is no joke to me.'

Yet she smiled happily, though her voice was melancholy. From her I now
learnt that my name was Richmond Roy, and not Harry Richmond. I said,
'Very well,' for I was used to change. Everybody in the house wore a
happy expression of countenance, except the monkey, who was too busy.
As we mounted the stairs I saw more kings of England painted on the
back-windows. Mrs. Waddy said: 'It is considered to give a monarchical
effect,'—she coughed modestly after the long word, and pursued: 'as it
should.' I insisted upon going to the top floor, where I expected to
find William the Conqueror, and found him; but that strong connecting
link between John Thresher and me presented himself only to carry my
recollections of the Dipwell of yesterday as far back into the past as
the old Norman days.

'And down go all the kings, downstairs,' I said, surveying them
consecutively.

'Yes,' she replied, in a tone that might lead one to think it their
lamentable fate. 'And did the people look at you as you drove along
through the streets, Master Richmond?'

I said 'Yes,' in turn; and then we left off answering, but questioned
one another, which is a quicker way of getting at facts; I know it is
with boys and women. Mrs. Waddy cared much less to hear of Dipwell and
its inhabitants than of the sensation created everywhere by our
equipage. I noticed that when her voice was not melancholy her face
was. She showed me a beautiful little pink bed, having a crown over it,
in a room opening to my father's. Twenty thousand magnificent dreams
seemed to flash their golden doors when I knew that the bed was mine. I
thought it almost as nice as a place by my father's side.

'Don't you like it, Mrs. Waddy?' I said.

She smiled and sighed. 'Like it? Oh! yes, my dear, to be sure I do. I
only hope it won't vanish.' She simpered and looked sad.

I had too many distractions, or I should have asked her whether my
amazing and delightful new home had ever shown symptoms of vanishing;
it appeared to me, judging from my experience, that nothing moved
violently except myself, and my principal concern was lest any one
should carry me away at a moment's notice. In the evening I was
introduced to a company of gentlemen, who were drinking wine after
dinner with my father. They clapped their hands and laughed
immoderately on my telling them that I thought those kings of England
who could not find room on the windows must have gone down to the
cellars.

'They are going,' my father said. He drank off a glassful of wine and
sighed prodigiously. 'They are going, gentlemen, going there, like good
wine, like old Port, which they tell us is going also. Favour me by
drinking to the health of Richmond Roy the younger.'

They drank to me heartily, but my father had fallen mournful before I
left the room.

Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French
from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed to
be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and
lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a
fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take
down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my
mornings. My father told the man who instructed me in the art of
self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession. I
wrestled ten minutes every day with this man's son, and was regularly
thrown. On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in
the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and
was much looked at. 'It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and
persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,' he said.
We used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and
the House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay
of British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William
Pitt (our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and
Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.

My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage. 'Now I
have you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,' he said. I
wished to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some
other place. He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth
would do it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth
in perfect trust. We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul's and
Westminster Abbey as of a day that had its charm. Our pew among a
fashionable congregation pleased him better. The pew-opener curtseyed
to none as she did to him. For my part, I missed the monuments and the
chants, and something besides that had gone—I knew not what. At the
first indication of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after
making me stand with my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like
a dragon in a piece of tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and
try to be the same that he had been in Mrs. Waddy's lodgings. Then we
read the Arabian Nights together, or, rather, he read them to me, often
acting out the incidents as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to
perform a duty was the fatal forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the
cream-tarts; if my father subjected me to an interrogation concerning
my lessons, he was the dread African magician to whom must be
surrendered my acquisition of the ring and the musty old lamp. We were
quite in the habit of meeting fair Persians. He would frequently
ejaculate that he resembled the Three Calendars in more respects than
one. To divert me during my recovery from measles, he one day hired an
actor in a theatre, and put a cloth round his neck, and seated him in a
chair, rubbed his chin with soap, and played the part of the Barber
over him, and I have never laughed so much in my life. Poor Mrs. Waddy
got her hands at her sides, and kept on gasping, 'Oh, sir! oh!' while
the Barber hurried away from the half-shaved young man to consult his
pretended astrolabe in the next room, where we heard him shouting the
sun's altitude, and consulting its willingness for the impatient young
man to be further shaved; and back he came, seeming refreshed to have
learnt the sun's favourable opinion, and gabbling at an immense rate,
full of barber's business. The servants were allowed to be spectators;
but as soon as the young man was shaved, my father dismissed them with
the tone of a master. No wonder they loved him. Mrs. Waddy asked who
could help it?

I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of
marrying again; it added a curious romantic tenderness to my adoration
of him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world. To have
his hand in mine was my delight. Then it was that I could think
earnestly of Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I
would not have minded his marrying. My favourite dream was to see him
shooting an arrow in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because
of not finding his arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to,
and wandering after it till he passed out of green fields to grassy
rocks, and to a stony desert, where at last he found his arrow at an
enormous distance from the shooting line, and there was the desert all
about him, and the sweetest fairy ever imagined going to show herself
to him in the ground under his feet. In his absence I really hungered
for him, and was jealous.

During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the
Continent, where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple;
and my father directed our movements through the aid of a telescope,
which told us the titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the
cities and cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and
the castles—they were little more to me than an animated book of
geography, opening and shutting at random; and travelling from place to
place must have seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I
was generally as quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace
between any two emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young
lady. My father made friends fast on our travels: her parents were
among the number, and she fell in love with me and enjoyed having the
name of Peribanou, which I bestowed on her for her delicious talk of
the blue and red-striped posts that would spout up fountains of pearls
if they were plucked from their beds, and the palaces that had flown
out of the farthest corners of the world, and the city that would some
night or other vanish suddenly, leaving bare sea-ripple to say 'Where?
where?' as they rolled over. I would have seen her marry my father
happily. She was like rest and dreams to me, soft sea and pearls. We
entered into an arrangement to correspond for life. Her name was Clara
Goodwin; she requested me to go always to the Horse Guards to discover
in what part of the world Colonel Goodwin might be serving when I
wanted to write to her. I, in return, could give no permanent address,
so I related my history from the beginning. 'To write to you would be
the same as writing to a river,' she said; and insisted that I should
drop the odious name of Roy when I grew a man. My father quarrelled
with Colonel Goodwin. Months after I felt as if I had only just been
torn from Clara, but she stood in a mist, irrecoverably distant. I had
no other friend.

Twelve dozen of splendid Burgundy were the fruit of our tour, to be
laid down at Dipwell farm for my arrival at my majority, when I should
be a legal man, embarked in my own ship, as my father said. I did not
taste the wine. 'Porter for me that day, please God!' cried Mrs. Waddy,
who did. My father eyed her with pity, and ordered her to send the wine
down to Dipwell, which was done. He took me between his knees, and said
impressively, 'Now, Richie, twelve dozen of the best that man can drink
await you at the gates of manhood. Few fathers can say that to their
sons, my boy! If we drink it together, blessings on the day! If I'm
gone, Richie, shut up in the long box,' his voice shook, and he added,
'gone to Peribanou underneath, you know, remember that your dada saw
that the wine was a good vintage, and bought it and had it bottled in
his own presence while you were asleep in the Emperor's room in the
fine old Burgundy city, and swore that, whatever came to them both, his
son should drink the wine of princes on the day of his majority.' Here
my father's tone was highly exalted, and he sat in a great flush.

I promised him I would bend my steps toward Dipwell to be there on my
twenty-first birthday, and he pledged himself to be there in spirit at
least, bodily if possible. We sealed the subject with some tears. He
often talked of commissioning a poet to compose verses about that
wonderful coming day at Dipwell. The thought of the day in store for us
sent me strutting as though I had been in the presence of my
drill-master. Mrs. Waddy, however, grew extremely melancholy at the
mention of it.

'Lord only knows where we shall all be by that time!' she sighed.

'She is a dewy woman,' said my father, disdainfully They appeared
always to be at variance, notwithstanding her absolute devotion to him.
My father threatened to have her married to somebody immediately if she
afflicted him with what he called her Waddyism. She had got the habit
of exclaiming at the end of her remarks, 'No matter; our clock strikes
soon!' in a way that communicated to me an obscure idea of a door going
to open unexpectedly in one of the walls, and conduct us, by
subterranean passages, into a new country. My father's method of
rebuking her anxious nature was to summon his cook, the funniest of
Frenchmen, Monsieur Alphonse, and issue orders for a succession of six
dinner-parties. 'And now, ma'am, you have occupation for your mind,' he
would say.

To judge by the instantaneous composure of her whole appearance, he did
produce a temporary abatement of her malady. The good soul bustled out
of the room in attendance upon M. Alphonse, and never complained while
the dinners lasted, but it was whispered that she had fits in the upper
part of the house. No sooner did my father hear the rumour than he
accused her to her face of this enormity, telling her that he was
determined to effect a permanent cure, even though she should drive him
to unlimited expense. We had a Ball party and an Aladdin supper, and
for a fortnight my father hired postillions; we flashed through London.
My father backed a horse to run in the races on Epsom Downs named
Prince Royal, only for the reason that his name was Prince Royal, and
the horse won, which was, he said, a proof to me that in our country it
was common prudence to stick to Royalty; and he bade me note that if he
went in a carriage and two, he was comparatively unnoticed, whereas
when he was beheld in a carriage and four, with postillions, at a
glance from him the country people tugged their forelocks, and would
like, if he would let them, to kiss his hand. 'We will try the scarlet
livery on one of our drives, Richie,' said he. Mrs. Waddy heard him.
'It is unlawful, sir,' she said. 'For whom, ma'am?' asked my father.
'None but Royal...' she was explaining, but stopped, for he showed her
an awful frown, and she cried so that my heart ached for her. My father
went out to order the livery on the spot. He was very excited. Then it
was that Mrs. Waddy, embracing me, said, 'My dear, my own Master
Richmond, my little Harry, prepare your poor child's heart for evil
days.' I construed her unintelligible speech as an attack upon my
father, and abused her violently.

While I was in this state of wrathful championship, the hall-door was
opened. I ran out and caught sight of my aunt Dorothy, in company with
old Mr. Bannerbridge. I was kissed and hugged for I know not how long,
until the smell of Riversley took entire possession of me, and my old
home seemed nearer than the one I lived in; but my aunt, seeing tears
on my cheeks, asked me what was my cause of sorrow. In a moment I
poured out a flood of complaints against Mrs. Waddy for vexing my
father. When she heard of the scarlet livery, my aunt lifted her hands.
'The man is near the end of his wits and his money together,' said Mr.
Bannerbridge; and she said to me, 'My darling Harry will come back to
his own nice little room, and see his grandpapa soon, won't you, my
pet? All is ready for him there as it used to be, except poor mama.
“Kiss my boy, my Harry—Harry Richmond.” Those were her last words on
her death-bed, before she went to God, Harry, my own! There is Sampson
the pony, and Harry's dog Prince, and his lamb Daisy, grown a sheep,
and the ploughboy, Dick, with the big boots.' Much more sweet talk of
the same current that made my face cloudy and bright, and filled me
with desire for Riversley, to see my mother's grave and my friends.

Aunt Dorothy looked at me. 'Come now,' she said; 'come with me, Harry.'
Her trembling seized on me like a fire. I said, 'Yes,' though my heart
sank as if I had lost my father with the word. She caught me in her
arms tight, murmuring, 'And dry our tears and make our house laugh. Oh!
since the night that Harry went..... And I am now Harry's mama, he has
me.'

I looked on her forehead for the wreath of white flowers my mother used
to wear, and thought of my father's letter with the prayer written on
the black-bordered page. I said I would go, but my joy in going was
gone. We were stopped in the doorway by Mrs. Waddy. Nothing would tempt
her to surrender me. Mr. Bannerbridge tried reasoning with her, and, as
he said, put the case, which seemed to have perched on his forefinger.
He talked of my prospects, of my sole chance of being educated morally
and virtuously as became the grandson of an English gentleman of a good
old family, and of my father having spent my mother's estate, and of
the danger of his doing so with mine, and of religious duty and the
awfulness of the position Mrs. Waddy stood in. He certainly subdued me
to very silent breathing, but did not affect me as my aunt Dorothy's
picturing of Riversley had done; and when Mrs. Waddy, reduced to an
apparent submissiveness, addressed me piteously, 'Master Richmond,
would you leave papa?' I cried out, 'No, no, never leave my papa,' and
twisted away from my aunt's keeping. My father's arrival caused me to
be withdrawn, but I heard his offer of his hospitality and all that was
his; and subsequently there was loud talking on his part. I was kissed
by my aunt before she went. She whispered, 'Come to us when you are
free; think of us when you pray.' She was full of tears. Mr.
Bannerbridge patted my head.

The door closed on them and I thought it was a vision that had passed.
But now my father set my heart panting with questions as to the
terrible possibility of us two ever being separated. In some way he
painted my grandfather so black that I declared earnestly I would
rather die than go to Riversley; I would never utter the name of the
place where there was evil speaking of the one I loved dearest. 'Do
not, my son,' he said solemnly, 'or it parts us two.' I repeated after
him, 'I am a Roy and not a Beltham.' It was enough to hear that insult
and shame had been cast on him at Riversley for me to hate the name of
the place. We cried and then laughed together, and I must have
delivered myself with amazing eloquence, for my father held me at arms'
length and said, 'Richie, the notion of training you for a General
commandership of the British army is a good one, but if you have got
the winning tongue, the woolsack will do as well for a whisper in the
ear of the throne. That is our aim, my son. We say,—you will not
acknowledge our birth, you shall acknowledge our worth.' He complained
bitterly of my aunt Dorothy bringing a lawyer to our house. The sins of
Mrs. Waddy were forgiven her, owing to her noble resistance to the
legal gentleman's seductive speech. So I walked up and down stairs with
the kings of England looking at me out of the coloured windows quietly
for a week; and then two ugly men entered the house, causing me to
suffer a fearful oppression, though my father was exceedingly kind to
them and had beds provided for them, saying that they were very old
retainers of his.

But the next day our scarlet livery appeared. After exacting particular
attention to his commands, my father quitted Mrs. Waddy, and we mounted
the carriage, laughing at her deplorable eyes and prim lips, which he
imitated for my amusement. 'A load is off my head,' he remarked. He
asked me if splendour did not fatigue me also. I caught the answer from
his face and replied that it did, and that I should like to go right on
to Dipwell 'The Burgundy sleeps safe there,' said my father, and
thought over it. We had an extraordinary day. People stood fast to gaze
at us; in the country some pulled off their hats and set up a cheer.
The landlords of the inns where we baited remained bare-headed until we
started afresh, and I, according to my father's example, bowed and
lifted my cap gravely to persons saluting us along the roads. Nor did I
seek to know the reason for this excess of respectfulness; I was
beginning to take to it naturally. At the end of a dusty high-road,
where it descends the hill into a town, we drew up close by a high red
wall, behind which I heard boys shouting at play. We went among them,
accompanied by their master. My father tipped the head boy for the
benefit of the school, and following lunch with the master and his
daughter, to whom I gave a kiss at her request, a half-holiday was
granted to the boys in my name. How they cheered! The young lady saw my
delight, and held me at the window while my father talked with hers;
and for a long time after I beheld them in imagination talking: that is
to say, my father issuing his instructions and Mr. Rippenger receiving
them like a pliant hodman; for the result of it was that two days
later, without seeing my kings of England, my home again, or London, I
was Julia Rippenger's intimate friend and the youngest pupil of the
school. My father told me subsequently that we slept at an hotel those
two nights intervening. Memory transplants me from the coach and
scarlet livery straight to my place of imprisonment.




CHAPTER V.
I MAKE A DEAR FRIEND


Heriot was the name of the head boy of the school. Boddy was the name
of one of the ushers. They were both in love with Julia Rippenger. It
was my fortune to outrun them in her favour for a considerable period,
during which time, though I had ceased to live in state, and was
wearing out my suits of velvet, and had neither visit nor letter from
my father, I was in tolerable bliss. Julia's kisses were showered on me
for almost anything I said or did, but her admiration of heroism and
daring was so fervent that I was in no greater danger of becoming
effeminate than Achilles when he wore girl's clothes. She was
seventeen, an age bewitching for boys to look up to and men to look
down on. The puzzle of the school was how to account for her close
relationship to old Rippenger. Such an apple on such a crab-tree seemed
monstrous. Heriot said that he hoped Boddy would marry old Rippenger's
real daughter, and, said he, that's birch-twigs. I related his
sparkling speech to Julia, who laughed, accusing him, however, of
impudence. She let me see a portrait of her dead mother, an Irish lady
raising dark eyelashes, whom she resembled. I talked of the portrait to
Heriot, and as I had privileges accorded to none of the other boys and
could go to her at any hour of the day after lessons, he made me beg
for him to have a sight of it. She considered awhile, but refused. On
hearing of the unkind refusal, Heriot stuck his hands into his pockets
and gave up cricketing. We saw him leaning against a wall in full view
of her window, while the boys crowded round him trying to get him to
practise, a school-match of an important character coming off with a
rival academy; and it was only through fear of our school being beaten
if she did not relent that Julia handed me the portrait, charging me
solemnly to bring it back. I promised, of course. Heriot went into his
favourite corner of the playground, and there looked at it and kissed
it, and then buttoned his jacket over it tight, growling when I asked
him to return it. Julia grew frightened. She sent me with numbers of
petitions to him.

'Look here, young un,' said Heriot; 'you're a good little fellow, and I
like you, but just tell her I believe in nothing but handwriting, and
if she writes to me for it humbly and nicely she shall have it back.
Say I only want to get a copy taken by a first-rate painter.'

Julia shed tears at his cruelty, called him cruel, wicked, false to his
word. She wrote, but the letter did not please him, and his reply was
scornful. At prayers morning and evening, it was pitiful to observe her
glance of entreaty and her downfallen eyelashes. I guessed that in
Heriot's letters to her he wanted to make her confess something, which
she would not do. 'Now I write to him no more; let him know it, my
darling,' she said, and the consequence of Heriot's ungrateful
obstinacy was that we all beheld her, at the ceremony of the
consecration of the new church, place her hand on Mr. Boddy's arm and
allow him to lead her about. Heriot kept his eyes on them; his mouth
was sharp, and his arms stiff by his sides. I was the bearer of a long
letter to her that evening. She tore it to pieces without reading it.
Next day Heriot walked slowly past Mr. Boddy holding the portrait in
his hands. The usher called to him!

'What have you there, Heriot?'

My hero stared. 'Only a family portrait,' he answered, thrusting it
safe in his pocket and fixing his gaze on Julia's window.

'Permit me to look at it,' said Mr. Boddy.

'Permit me to decline to let you,' said Heriot.

'Look at me, sir,' cried Boddy.

'I prefer to look elsewhere, sir,' replied Heriot, and there was Julia
visible at her window.

'I asked you, sir, civilly,' quoth Boddy, 'for permission to look,—I
used the word intentionally; I say I asked you for permission...'

'No, you didn't,' Heriot retorted, quite cool; 'inferentially you did;
but you did not use the word permission.'

'And you turned upon me impudently,' pursued Boddy, whose colour was
thunder: 'you quibbled, sir; you prevaricated; you concealed what you
were carrying...'

'Am carrying,' Heriot corrected his tense; 'and mean to, in spite of
every Boddy,' he murmured audibly.

'Like a rascal detected in an act of felony,' roared Boddy, 'you
concealed it, sir...'

'Conceal it, sir.'

'And I demand, in obedience to my duty, that you instantly exhibit it
for my inspection, now, here, at once; no parleying; unbutton, or I
call Mr. Rippenger to compel you.'

I was standing close by my brave Heriot, rather trembling, studious of
his manfulness though I was. His left foot was firmly in advance, as he
said, just in the manner to start an usher furious:

'I concealed it, I conceal it; I was carrying it, I carry it: you
demand that I exhibit for your inspection what I mean no Boddy to see?
I have to assure you respectfully, sir, that family portraits are
sacred things with the sons of gentlemen. Here, Richie, off!'

I found the portrait in my hand, and Heriot between me and the usher,
in the attitude of a fellow keeping another out of his home at
prisoner's-base. He had spied Mr. Rippenger's head at the playground
gate. I had just time to see Heriot and the usher in collision before I
ran through the gate and into Julia's arms in her garden, whither the
dreadful prospect of an approaching catastrophe had attracted her.

Heriot was merely reported guilty of insolence. He took his five
hundred lines of Virgil with his usual sarcastic dignity: all he said
to Mr. Rippenger was, 'Let it be about Dido, sir,' which set several of
the boys upon Dido's history, but Heriot was condemned to the battles
with Turnus. My share in this event secured Heriot's friendship to me
without costing me the slightest inconvenience. 'Papa would never
punish you,' Julia said; and I felt my rank. Nor was it wonderful I
should when Mr. Rippenger was constantly speaking of my father's
magnificence in my presence before company. Allowed to draw on him
largely for pocket-money, I maintained my father's princely reputation
in the school. At times, especially when the holidays arrived and I was
left alone with Julia, I had fits of mournfulness, and almost thought
the boys happier than I was. Going home began to seem an unattainable
thing to me. Having a father, too, a regular father, instead of a
dazzling angel that appeared at intervals, I considered a benefaction,
in its way, some recompense to the boys, for their not possessing one
like mine. My anxiety was relieved by my writing letters to my father,
addressed to the care of Miss Julia Rippenger, and posting them in her
work-basket. She favoured me with very funny replies, signed, 'Your own
ever-loving Papa,' about his being engaged killing Bengal tigers and
capturing white elephants, a noble occupation that gave me exciting and
consolatory dreams of him.

We had at last a real letter of his, dated from a foreign city; but he
mentioned nothing of coming to me. I understood that Mr. Rippenger was
disappointed with it.

Gradually a kind of cloud stole over me. I no longer liked to ask for
pocket-money; I was clad in a suit of plain cloth; I was banished from
the parlour, and only on Sunday was I permitted to go to Julia. I
ceased to live in myself. Through the whole course of lessons, at
play-time, in my bed, and round to morning bell, I was hunting my
father in an unknown country, generally with the sun setting before me:
I ran out of a wood almost into a brook to see it sink as if I had
again lost sight of him, and then a sense of darkness brought me back
to my natural consciousness, without afflicting me much, but
astonishing me. Why was I away from him? I could repeat my lessons in
the midst of these dreams quite fairly; it was the awakening among the
circle of the boys that made me falter during a recital and ask myself
why I was there and he absent? They had given over speculating on
another holiday and treat from my father; yet he had produced such an
impression in the school that even when I had descended to the level of
a total equality with them, they continued to have some consideration
for me. I was able to talk of foreign cities and could tell stories,
and I was, besides, under the immediate protection of Heriot. But now
the shadow of a great calamity fell on me, for my dear Heriot announced
his intention of leaving the school next half.

'I can't stand being prayed at, morning and evening, by a fellow who
hasn't the pluck to strike me like a man,' he said. Mr. Rippenger had
the habit of signalizing offenders, in his public prayers, as boys
whose hearts he wished to be turned from callousness. He perpetually
suspected plots; and to hear him allude to some deep, long-hatched
school conspiracy while we knelt motionless on the forms, and fetch a
big breath to bring out, 'May the heart of Walter Heriot be turned and
he comprehend the multitudinous blessings,' etc., was intensely
distressing. Together with Walter Heriot, Andrew Saddlebank, our best
bowler, the drollest fellow in the world, John Salter, and little Gus
Temple, were oftenest cited. They declared that they invariably uttered
'Amen,' as Heriot did, but we none of us heard this defiant murmur of
assent from their lips. Heriot pronounced it clearly and cheerfully,
causing Julia's figure to shrink as she knelt with her face in the
chair hard by her father's desk-pulpit. I received the hearty
congratulations of my comrades for singing out 'Amen' louder than
Heriot, like a chorister, though not in so prolonged a note, on hearing
to my stupefaction Mr. Rippenger implore that the heart of 'him we know
as Richmond Roy' might be turned. I did it spontaneously. Mr. Rippenger
gazed at me in descending from his desk; Julia, too, looking grieved.
For my part, I exulted in having done a thing that gave me a likeness
to Heriot.

'Little Richmond, you're a little hero,' he said, caressing me. 'I saw
old Rippenger whisper to that beast, Boddy. Never mind; they won't hurt
you as long as I'm here. Grow tough, that's what you've got to do. I'd
like to see you horsed, only to see whether you're game to take it
without wincing—if it didn't hurt you much, little lad.'

He hugged me up to him.

'I'd take anything for you, Heriot,' said I.

'All right,' he answered, never meaning me to suffer on his account. He
had an inimitable manner of sweet speaking that endeared him to younger
boys capable of appreciating it, with the supernatural power of music.
It endeared him, I suppose, to young women also. Julia repeated his
phrases, as for instance, 'Silly boy, silly boy,' spoken with a wave of
his hand, when a little fellow thanked him for a kindness. She was
angry at his approval of what she called my defiance of her father, and
insisted that I was the catspaw of one of Heriot's plots to vex him.
'Tell Heriot you have my command to say you belong to me and must not
be misled,' she said. His answer was that he wanted it in writing. She
requested him to deliver up her previous letters. Thereupon he charged
me with a lengthy epistle, which plunged us into boiling water. Mr.
Boddy sat in the schoolroom while Heriot's pen was at work, on the wet
Sunday afternoon. His keen little eyes were busy in his flat bird's
head all the time Heriot continued writing. He saw no more than that
Heriot gave me a book; but as I was marching away to Julia he called to
know where I was going.

'To Miss Rippenger,' I replied.

'What have you there?'

'A book, sir.'

'Show me the book.'

I stood fast.

'It's a book I have lent him, sir,' said Heriot, rising. 'I shall see
if it's a fit book for a young boy,' said Boddy; and before Heriot
could interpose, he had knocked the book on the floor, and out fell the
letter. Both sprang down to seize it: their heads encountered, but
Heriot had the quicker hand; he caught the letter, and cried 'Off!' to
me, as on another occasion. This time, however, he was not between me
and the usher. I was seized by the collar, and shaken roughly.

'You will now understand that you are on a footing with the rest of the
boys, you Roy,' said Boddy. 'Little scoundrelly spoilt urchins,
upsetting the discipline of the school, won't do here. Heriot, here is
your book. I regret,' he added, sneering, 'that a leaf is torn.'

'I regret, sir, that the poor boy was so savagely handled,' said
Heriot.

He was warned to avoid insolence.

'Oh, as much Virgil as you like,' Heriot retorted; 'I know him by
heart.'

It was past the hour of my customary visit to Julia, and she came to
discover the reason of my delay. Boddy stood up to explain. Heriot went
forward, saying, 'I think I'm the one who ought to speak, Miss
Rippenger. The fact is, I hear from little Roy that you are fond of
tales of Indian adventure, and I gave him a book for you to read, if
you like it. Mr. Boddy objected, and treated the youngster rather
rigorously. It must have been quite a misunderstanding on his part.
Here is the book it's extremely amusing.'

Julia blushed very red. She accepted the book with a soft murmur, and
the sallow usher had not a word.

'Stay,' said Heriot. 'I took the liberty to write some notes. My father
is an Indian officer, you know, and some of the terms in the book are
difficult without notes. Richie, hand that paper. Here they are, Miss
Rippenger, if you'll be so kind as to place them in the book.'

I was hoping with all my might that she would not deny him. She did,
and my heart sank.

'Oh, I can read it without notes,' she said, cheerfully.

After that, I listened with indifference to her petition to Boddy that
I might be allowed to accompany her, and was not at all chagrined by
his refusal. She laid down the book, saying that I could bring it to
her when I was out of disgrace.

In the evening we walked in the playground, where Heriot asked me to do
a brave thing, which he would never forget. This was that I should take
a sharp run right past Boddy, who was pacing up and down before the
gate leading into Julia's garden, and force her to receive the letter.
I went bounding like a ball. The usher, suspecting only that I hurried
to speak to him, let me see how indignant he was with my behaviour by
striding all the faster as I drew near, and so he passed the gate, and
I rushed in. I had just time to say to Julia, 'Hide it, or I'm in such
a scrape.'

The next minute she was addressing my enemy: 'Surely you would not
punish him because he loves me?' and he, though he spoke of
insubordination, merited chastisement, and other usher phrases, seemed
to melt, and I had what I believe was a primary conception of the power
of woman. She led him to talk in the gentlest way possible of how the
rain had refreshed her flowers, and of this and that poor rose.

I could think of nothing but the darling letter, which had flashed out
of sight as a rabbit pops into burrows. Boddy departed with a rose.

'Ah, Richie,' she said, 'I have to pay to have you with me now.'

We walked to the summer-house, where she read Heriot's letter through.
'But he is a boy! How old is Heriot? He is not so old as I am!'

These were her words, and she read the letter anew, and read it again
after she had placed it in her bosom, I meanwhile pouring out praises
of Heriot.

'You speak of him as if you were in love with him, Richmond,' she said.

'And I do love him,' I answered.

'Not with me?' she asked.

'Yes, I do love you too, if you will not make him angry.'

'But do you know what it is he wants of me?'

I guessed: 'Yes; he wants you to let him sit close to you for half an
hour.'

She said that he sat very near her in church.

'Ah,' said I, 'but he mustn't interrupt the sermon.'

She laughed, and mouthed me over with laughing kisses. 'There's very
little he hasn't daring enough for!'

We talked of his courage.

'Is he good as well?' said Julia, more to herself than to me; but I
sang out,

'Good! Oh, so kind!'

This appeared to convince her.

'Very generous to you and every one, is he not?' she said; and from
that moment was all questions concerning his kind treatment of the
boys, and as to their looking up to him.

I quitted her, taking her message to Heriot: 'You may tell him—tell him
that I can't write.'

Heriot frowned on hearing me repeat it.

'Humph!' he went, and was bright in a twinkling: 'that means she'll
come!' He smacked his hands together, grew black, and asked, 'Did she
give that beast Boddy a rose?'

I had to confess she did; and feeling a twinge of my treason to her,
felt hers to Heriot.

'Humph!' he went; 'she shall suffer for that.'

All this was like music going on until the curtain should lift and
reveal my father to me.

There was soon a secret to be read in Heriot's face for one who loved
it as I did. Julia's betrayed nothing. I was not taken into their
confidence, and luckily not; otherwise I fear I should have served them
ill, I was so poor a dissembler and was so hotly plied with
interrogations by the suspicious usher. I felt sure that Heriot and
Julia met. His eyes were on her all through prayer-time, and hers
wandered over the boys' heads till they rested on him, when they gave a
short flutter and dropped, like a bird shot dead. The boys must have
had some knowledge that love was busy in their midst, for they spoke of
Heriot and Julia as a jolly couple, and of Boddy as one meaning to play
the part of old Nick the first opportunity. She was kinder to them than
ever. It was not a new thing that she should send in cakes of her own
making, but it was extraordinary that we should get these thoughtful
presents as often as once a fortnight, and it became usual to hear a
boy exclaim, either among a knot of fellows or to himself, 'By jingo,
she is a pretty girl!' on her passing out of the room, and sometimes
entirely of his own idea. I am persuaded that if she had consented to
marry Boddy, the boys would have been seriously disposed to conspire to
jump up in the church and forbid the banns. We should have preferred to
hand her to the junior usher, Catman, of whom the rumour ran in the
school that he once drank a bottle of wine and was sick after it, and
he was therefore a weak creature to our minds; the truth of the rumour
being confirmed by his pale complexion. That we would have handed our
blooming princess to him was full proof of our abhorrence of Boddy. I
might have thought with the other boys that she was growing prettier,
only I never could imagine her so delicious as when she smiled at my
father.

The consequence of the enlistment of the whole school in Heriot's
interests was that at cricket-matches, picnics on the hills, and
boating on the canal, Mr. Boddy was begirt with spies, and little
Temple reported to Heriot a conversation that he, lying hidden in tall
grass, had heard between Boddy and Julia. Boddy asked her to take
private lessons in French from him. Heriot listened to the monstrous
tale as he was on the point of entering Julia's boat, where Boddy sat
beside her, and Heriot rowed stroke-oar. He dipped his blade, and said,
loud enough to be heard by me in Catman's boat,

'Do you think French useful in a military education, sir?'

And Boddy said, 'Yes, of course it is.'

Says Heriot, 'Then I think I shall take lessons.'

Boddy told him he was taking lessons in the school.

'Oh!' says Heriot, 'I mean private lessons'; and here he repeated one
of Temple's pieces of communication: 'so much more can be imparted in a
private lesson!'

Boddy sprang half up from his seat. 'Row, sir, and don't talk,' he
growled.

'Sit, sir, and don't dance in the boat, if you please, or the lady will
be overset,' said Heriot.

Julia requested to be allowed to land and walk home. Boddy caught the
rudder lines and leapt on the bank to hand her out; then all the boys
in her boat and in Catman's shouted, 'Miss Julia! dear Miss Julia,
don't leave us!' and we heard wheedling voices: 'Don't go off with him
alone!' Julia bade us behave well or she would not be able to come out
with us. At her entreaty Boddy stepped back to his post, and the two
boats went forward like swans that have done ruffling their feathers.

The boys were exceedingly disappointed that no catastrophe followed the
events of the day. Heriot, they thought, might have upset the boat,
saved Julia, and drowned Boddy, and given us a feast of pleasurable
excitement: instead of which Boddy lived to harass us with his
tyrannical impositions and spiteful slaps, and it was to him, not to
our Heriot, that Julia was most gracious. Some of us discussed her
conduct.

'She's a coquette,' said little Temple. I went off to the French
dictionary.

'Is Julia Rippenger a coquette, Heriot?' I asked him.

'Keep girls out of your heads, you little fellows,' said he, dealing me
a smart thump.

'Is a coquette a nasty girl?' I persisted.

'No, a nice one, as it happens,' was his answer.

My only feeling was jealousy of the superior knowledge of the sex
possessed by Temple, for I could not fathom the meaning of coquette;
but he had sisters. Temple and I walked the grounds together, mutually
declaring how much we would forfeit for Heriot's sake. By this time my
Sunday visits to Julia had been interdicted: I was plunged, as it were,
in the pit of the school, and my dreams of my father were losing
distinctness. A series of boxes on the ears from Boddy began to astound
and transform me. Mr. Rippenger, too, threatened me with carvings,
though my offences were slight. 'Yes,' said Temple and I, in chorus,
'but you daren't strike Heriot!' This was our consolation, and the
sentiment of the school. Fancy, then, our amazement to behold him
laying the cane on Heriot's shoulders as fiercely as he could, and
Boddy seconding him. The scene was terrible. We were all at our desks
doing evening tasks for the morrow, a great matchday at cricket, Boddy
watching over us, and bellowing, 'Silence at your work, you lazy
fellows, if you want lessons to be finished at ten in the morning!' A
noise came growing up to us from below, up the stairs from the
wet-weather shed, and Heriot burst into the room, old Rippenger after
him, panting.

'Mr. Boddy, you were right,' he cried, 'I find him a prowler, breaking
all rules of discipline. A perverted, impudent rascal! An example shall
be set to my school, sir. We have been falling lax. What! I find the
puppy in my garden whistling—he confesses—for one of my servants—here,
Mr. Boddy, if you please. My school shall see that none insult me with
impunity!' He laid on Heriot like a wind on a bulrush. Heriot bent his
shoulders a trifle, not his head.

'Hit away, sir,' he said, during the storm of blows, and I, through my
tears, imagined him (or I do now) a young eagle forced to bear the
thunder, but with his face to it. Then we saw Boddy lay hands on him,
and in a twinkling down pitched the usher, and the boys
cheered—chirped, I should say, they exulted so, and merely sang out
like birds, without any wilfulness of delight or defiance. After the
fall of Boddy we had no sense of our hero suffering shame. Temple and I
clutched fingers tight as long as the blows went on. We hoped for Boddy
to make another attempt to touch Heriot; he held near the master,
looking ready to spring, like a sallow panther; we kept hoping he
would, in our horror of the murderous slashes of the cane; and not a
syllable did Heriot utter. Temple and I started up, unaware of what we
were going to do, or of anything until we had got a blow a-piece, and
were in the thick of it, and Boddy had us both by the collars, and was
knocking our heads together, as he dragged us back to our seats. But
the boys told us we stopped the execution. Mr. Rippenger addressed us
before he left the school-room. Saddlebank, Salter, and a good many
others, plugged their ears with their fists. That night Boddy and
Catman paced in the bedchambers, to prevent plotting and conspiracy,
they said. I longed to get my arms about Heriot, and thought of him,
and dreamed of blood, and woke in the morning wondering what made me
cry, and my arms and back very stiff. Heriot was gay as ever, but had
fits of reserve; the word passed round that we were not to talk of
yesterday evening. We feared he would refuse to play in the match.

'Why not?' said he, staring at us angrily. 'Has Saddlebank broken his
arm, and can't bowl?'

No, Saddlebank was in excellent trim, though shamefaced, as was Salter,
and most of the big boys were. They begged Heriot to let them shake his
hand.

'Wait till we win our match,' said Heriot.

Julia did not appear at morning prayers.

'Ah,' said Temple, 'it'd make her sick to hear old Massacre praying.'
It had nearly made him sick, he added, and I immediately felt that it
had nearly made me sick.

We supposed we should not see Julia at the match. She came, however,
and talked to everybody. I could not contain myself, I wanted so to
tell her what had befallen Heriot overnight, while he was batting, and
the whole ground cheering his hits. I on one side of her whispered:

'I say, Julia, my dear, I say, do you know...'

And Temple on the other: 'Miss Julia, I wish you'd let me tell you—'

We longed to arouse her pity for Heriot at the moment she was admiring
him, but she checked us, and as she was surrounded by ladies and
gentlemen of the town, and particular friends of hers, we could not
speak out. Heriot brought his bat to the booth for eighty-nine runs.
His sleeve happened to be unbuttoned, and there, on his arm, was a mark
of the cane.

'Look!' I said to Julia. But she looked at me.

'Richie, are you ill?'

She assured me I was very pale, and I felt her trembling excessively,
and her parasol was covering us.

'Here, Roy, Temple,' we heard Heriot call; 'here, come here and bowl to
me.'

I went and bowled till I thought my head was flying after the ball and
getting knocks, it swam and throbbed so horribly.

Temple related that I fell, and was carried all the way from the
cricket-field home by Heriot, who would not give me up to the usher. I
was in Julia's charge three days. Every time I spoke of her father and
Heriot, she cried, 'Oh, hush!' and had tears on her eyelids. When I was
quite strong again, I made her hear me out. She held me and rocked over
me like a green tree in the wind and rain.

'Was any name mentioned?' she asked, with her mouth working, and to my
'No,' said 'No, she knew there was none,' and seemed to drink and
choke, and was one minute calm, all but a trembling hanging underlip,
next smiling on me, and next having her face carved in grimaces by the
jerking little tugs of her mouth, which I disliked to see, for she
would say nothing of what she thought of Heriot, and I thought to
myself, though I forbore to speak unkindly, 'It's no use your making
yourself look ugly, Julia.' If she had talked of Heriot, I should have
thought that crying persons' kisses were agreeable.

On my return into the school, I found it in a convulsion of excitement,
owing to Heriot's sending Boddy a challenge to fight a duel with
pistols. Mr. Rippenger preached a sermon to the boys concerning the
unChristian spirit and hideous moral perversity of one who would even
consent to fight a duel. How much more reprehensible, then, was one
that could bring himself to defy a fellow-creature to mortal combat! We
were not of his opinion; and as these questions are carried by
majorities, we decided that Boddy was a coward, and approved the idea
that Heriot would have to shoot or scourge him when the holidays came.
Mr. Rippenger concluded his observations by remarking that the sharpest
punishment he could inflict upon Heriot was to leave him to his own
conscience; which he did for three days, and then asked him if he was
in a fit state of mind to beg Mr. Boddy's pardon publicly.

'I'm quite prepared to tell him what I think of him publicly, sir,'
said Heriot.

A murmur of exultation passed through the school. Mr. Rippenger seized
little Temple, and flogged him. Far from dreading the rod, now that
Heriot and Temple had tasted it, I thought of punishment as a mad
pleasure, not a bit more awful than the burning furze-bush plunged into
by our fellows in a follow-my-leader scamper on the common; so I caught
Temple's hand as he went by me, and said, eagerly, 'Shall I sing out
hurrah?'

'Bother it!' was Temple's answer, for he had taken a stinging dozen,
and had a tender skin.

Mr. Rippenger called me up to him, to inform me, that whoever I was,
and whatever I was, and I might be a little impostor foisted on his
benevolence, yet he would bring me to a knowledge of myself: he gave me
warning of it; and if my father objected to his method, my father must
write word to that effect, and attend punctually to business duties,
for Surrey House was not an almshouse, either for the sons of gentlemen
of high connection, or for the sons of vagabonds. Mr. Rippenger added a
spurning shove on my shoulder to his recommendation to me to resume my
seat. I did not understand him at all. I was, in fact, indebted to a
boy named Drew, a known sneak, for the explanation, in itself difficult
to comprehend. It was, that Mr. Rippenger was losing patience because
he had received no money on account of my boarding and schooling. The
intelligence filled my head like the buzz of a fly, occupying my
meditations without leading them anywhere. I spoke on the subject to
Heriot.

'Oh, the sordid old brute!' said he of Mr. Rippenger. 'How can he know
the habits and feelings of gentlemen? Your father's travelling, and
can't write, of course. My father's in India, and I get a letter from
him about once a year. We know one another, and I know he's one of the
best officers in the British army. It's just the way with schoolmasters
and tradesmen: they don't care whether a man is doing his duty to his
country; he must attend to them, settle accounts with them—hang them!
I'll send you money, dear little lad, after I've left.'

He dispersed my brooding fit. I was sure my father was a fountain of
gold, and only happened to be travelling. Besides, Heriot's love for
Julia, whom none of us saw now, was an incessant distraction. She did
not appear at prayers. She sat up in the gallery at church, hardly to
be spied. A letter that Heriot flung over the gardenwall for her was
returned to him, open, enclosed by post.

'A letter for Walter Heriot,' exclaimed Mr. Boddy, lifting it high for
Heriot to walk and fetch it; and his small eyes blinked when Heriot
said aloud on his way, cheerfully,

'A letter from the colonel in India!'

Boddy waited a minute, and then said, 'Is your father in good health?'

Heriot's face was scarlet. At first he stuttered, 'My father!—I hope
so! What have you in common with him, sir?'

'You stated that the letter was from your father,' said Boddy.

'What if it is, sir?'

'Oh, in that case, nothing whatever to me.'

They talked on, and the youngest of us could perceive Boddy was
bursting with devilish glee. Heriot got a letter posted to Julia. It
was laid on his desk, with her name scratched completely out, and his
put in its place. He grew pale and sad, but did his work, playing his
games, and only letting his friends speak to him of lessons and play.
His counsel to me was, that in spite of everything, I was always to
stick to my tasks and my cricket. His sadness he could not conceal. He
looked like an old lamp with a poor light in it. Not a boy in the
school missed seeing how Boddy's flat head perpetually had a side-eye
on him.

All this came to an end. John Salter's father lived on the other side
of the downs, and invited three of us to spend a day at his house. The
selection included Heriot, Saddlebank, and me. Mr. Rippenger, not
liking to refuse Mr. Salter, consented to our going, but pretended that
I was too young. Salter said his mother and sisters very much wished to
make my acquaintance. We went in his father's carriage. A jolly wind
blew clouds and dust and leaves: I could have fancied I was going to my
own father. The sensation of freedom had a magical effect on me, so
that I was the wildest talker of them all. Even in the middle of the
family I led the conversation; and I did not leave Salter's house
without receiving an assurance from his elder sisters that they were in
love with me. We drove home—back to prison, we called it—full of good
things, talking of Salter's father's cellar of wine and of my majority
Burgundy, which I said, believing it was true, amounted to twelve
hundred dozen; and an appointment was made for us to meet at Dipwell
Farm, to assist in consuming it, in my honour and my father's. That
matter settled, I felt myself rolling over and over at a great rate,
and clasping a juniper tree. The horses had trenched from the chalk
road on to the downs. I had been shot out. Heriot and Salter had jumped
out—Heriot to look after me; but Saddlebank and the coachman were
driving at a great rate over the dark slope. Salter felt some anxiety
concerning his father's horses, so we left him to pursue them, and
walked on laughing, Heriot praising me for my pluck.

'I say good-bye to you to-night, Richie,' said he. 'We're certain to
meet again. I shall go to a military school. Mind you enter a cavalry
regiment when you're man enough. Look in the Army List, you'll find me
there. My aunt shall make a journey and call on you while you're at
Rippenger's, so you shan't be quite lonely.'

To my grief, I discovered that Heriot had resolved he would not return
to school.

'You'll get thrashed,' he said; 'I can't help it: I hope you've grown
tough by this time. I can't stay here. I feel more like a dog than a
man in that house now. I'll see you back safe. No crying, young
cornet!'

We had lost the sound of the carriage. Heriot fell to musing. He
remarked that the accident took away from Mr. Salter the responsibility
of delivering him at Surrey House, but that he, Heriot, was bound, for
Mr. Salter's sake, to conduct me to the doors; an unintelligible
refinement of reasoning, to my wits. We reached our town between two
and three in the morning. There was a ladder leaning against one of the
houses in repair near the school. 'You are here, are you!' said Heriot,
speaking to the ladder: 'you's do me a service—the last I shall want in
the neighbourhood.' He managed to poise the ladder on his shoulder, and
moved forward.

'Are we going in through the window?' I asked, seeing him fix the
ladder against the school-house wall.

He said, 'Hush; keep a look-out.'

I saw him mount high. When he tapped at the window I remembered it was
Julia's; I heard her cry out inside. The window rose slowly. Heriot
spoke:

'I have come to say good-bye to you, Julia, dear girl: don't be afraid
of me.' She answered inaudibly to my ears. He begged her to come to him
at once, only once, and hear him and take his hand. She was timid; he
had her fingers first, then her whole arm, and she leaned over him.
'Julia, my sweet, dear girl,' he said; and she:

'Heriot, Walter, don't go—don't go; you do not care for me if you go.
Oh, don't go.'

'We've come to it,' said Heriot.

She asked why he was not in bed, and moaned on:

'Don't go.' I was speechless with wonder at the night and the scene.
They whispered; I saw their faces close together, and Heriot's arms
round her neck. 'Oh, Heriot, my darling, my Walter,' she said, crying,
I knew by the sound of her voice.

'Tell me you love me,' said Heriot.

'I do, I do, only don't go,' she answered.

'Will you love me faithfully?'

'I will; I do.'

'Say, “I love you, Walter.”'

'I love you, Walter.'

'For ever.'

'For ever. Oh! what a morning for me. Do you smell my honeysuckle? Oh,
don't go away from me, Walter. Do you love me so?'

'I'd go through a regiment of sabres to get at you.'

'But smell the night air; how sweet! oh, how sweet! No, not kiss me, if
you are going to leave me; not kiss me, if you can be so cruel!'

'Do you dream of me in your bed?'

'Yes, every night.'

'God bless the bed!'

'Every night I dream of you. Oh! brave Heriot; dear, dear Walter, you
did not betray me; my father struck you, and you let him for my sake.
Every night I pray heaven to make you forgive him: I thought you would
hate me. I cried till I was glad you could not see me. Look at those
two little stars; no, they hurt me, I can't look at them ever again.
But no, you are not going; you want to frighten me. Do smell the
flowers. Don't make them poison to me. Oh, what a morning for me when
you're lost! And me, to look out on the night alone! No, no more
kisses! Oh, yes, I will kiss you, dear.'

Heriot said, 'Your mother was Irish, Julia.'

'Yes. She would have loved you.'

'I've Irish blood too. Give me her portrait. It's the image of you.'

'To take away? Walter! not to take it away?'

'You darling! to keep me sure of you.'

'Part with my mother's portrait?'

'Why, yes, if you love me one bit.'

'But you are younger than me, Heriot.'

'Then good-night, good-bye, Julia.'

'Walter, I will fetch it.'

Heriot now told her I was below, and she looked down on me and called
my name softly, sending kisses from her fingers while he gave the cause
for our late return.

'Some one must be sitting up for you—are we safe?' she said.

Heriot laughed, and pressed for the portrait.

'It is all I have. Why should you not have it? I want to be
remembered.'

She sobbed as she said this and disappeared. Heriot still talked into
her room. I thought I heard a noise of the garden-door opening. A man
came out rushing at the ladder. I called in terror: 'Mr. Boddy, stop,
sir.' He pushed me savagely aside, pitching his whole force against the
ladder. Heriot pulled down Julia's window; he fell with a heavy thump
on the ground, and I heard a shriek above. He tried to spring to his
feet, but dropped, supported himself on one of his hands, and cried:

'All right; no harm done; how do you do, Mr. Boddy? I thought I'd try
one of the attics, as we were late, not to disturb the house. I'm not
hurt, I tell you,' he cried as loud as he could.

The usher's words were in a confusion of rage and inquiries. He
commanded Heriot to stand on his legs, abused him, asked him what he
meant by it, accused him of depravity, of crime, of disgraceful
conduct, and attempted to pluck him from the spot.

'Hands off me,' said Heriot; 'I can help myself. The youngster 'll help
me, and we'll go round to the front door. I hope, sir, you will behave
like a gentleman; make no row here, Mr. Boddy, if you've any respect
for people inside. We were upset by Mr. Salter's carriage; it's damaged
my leg, I believe. Have the goodness, sir, to go in by your road, and
we'll go round and knock at the front door in the proper way. We shall
have to disturb the house after all.'

Heriot insisted. I was astonished to see Boddy obey him and leave us,
after my dear Heriot had hopped with his hand on my shoulder to the
corner of the house fronting the road. While we were standing alone a
light cart drove by. Heriot hailed it, and hopped up to the driver.

'Take me to London, there's a good fellow,' he said; 'I'm a gentleman;
you needn't look fixed. I'll pay you well and thank you. But quick.
Haul me up, up; here's my hand. By jingo! this is pain.'

The man said, 'Scamped it out of school, sir?'

Heriot replied: 'Mum. Rely on me when I tell you I'm a gentleman.'

'Well, if I pick up a gentleman, I can't be doing a bad business,' said
the man, hauling him in tenderly.

Heriot sung to me in his sweet manner, 'Good-bye, little Richie. Knock
when five minutes are over. God bless you, dear little lad! Leg 'll get
well by morning, never fear for me; and we'll meet somehow; we'll drink
the Burgundy. No crying. Kiss your hand to me.'

I kissed my hand to him. I had no tears to shed; my chest kept heaving
enormously. My friend was gone. I stood in the road straining to hear
the last of the wheels after they had long been silent.




CHAPTER VI.
A TALE OF A GOOSE


From that hour till the day Heriot's aunt came to see me, I lived
systematically out of myself in extreme flights of imagination, locking
my doors up, as it were, all the faster for the extremest strokes of
Mr. Rippenger's rod. He remarked justly that I grew an impenetrably
sullen boy, a constitutional rebel, a callous lump: and assured me that
if my father would not pay for me, I at least should not escape my
debts. The title of little impostor, transmitted from the master's
mouth to the school in designation of one who had come to him as a
young prince, and for whom he had not received one penny's
indemnification, naturally caused me to have fights with several of the
boys. Whereupon I was reported: I was prayed at to move my spirit, and
flogged to exercise my flesh. The prayers I soon learnt to laugh to
scorn. The floggings, after they were over, crowned me with delicious
sensations of martyrdom. Even while the sting lasted I could say, it's
for Heriot and Julia! and it gave me a wonderful penetration into—the
mournful ecstasy of love. Julia was sent away to a relative by the
sea-side, because, one of the housemaids told me, she could not bear to
hear of my being beaten. Mr. Rippenger summoned me to his private room
to bid me inform him whether I had other relatives besides my father,
such as grandfather, grandmother, uncles, or aunts, or a mother. I dare
say Julia would have led me to break my word to my father by speaking
of old Riversley, a place I half longed for since my father had grown
so distant and dim to me; but confession to Mr. Rippenger seemed, as he
said of Heriot's behaviour to him, a gross breach of trust to my
father; so I refused steadily to answer, and suffered the consequences
now on my dear father's behalf. Heriot's aunt brought me a cake, and in
a letter from him an extraordinary sum of money for a boy of my age. He
wrote that he knew I should want it to pay my debts for treats to the
boys and keep them in good humour. He believed also that his people
meant to have me for the Christmas holidays. The sum he sent me was
five pounds, carefully enclosed. I felt myself a prince again. The
money was like a golden gate through which freedom twinkled a finger.
Forthwith I paid my debts, amounting to two pounds twelve shillings,
and instructed a couple of day-boarders, commercial fellows, whose
heavy and mysterious charges for commissions ran up a bill in no time,
to prepare to bring us materials for a feast on Saturday. Temple
abominated the trading propensities of these boys. 'They never get
licked and they've always got money, at least I know they always get
mine,' said he; 'but you and I and Heriot despise them.' Our position
toward them was that of an encumbered aristocracy, and really they paid
us great respect. The fact was that, when they had trusted us, they
were compelled to continue obsequious, for Heriot had instilled the
sentiment in the school, that gentlemen never failed to wipe out debts
in the long run, so it was their interest to make us feel they knew us
to be gentlemen, who were at some time or other sure to pay, and thus
also they operated on our consciences. From which it followed that one
title of superiority among us, ranking next in the order of nobility to
the dignity conferred by Mr. Rippenger's rod, was the being down in
their books. Temple and I walked in the halo of unlimited credit like
more than mortal twins. I gave an order for four bottles of champagne.

On the Friday evening Catman walked out with us. His studious habits
endeared him to us immensely, owing to his having his head in his book
on all occasions, and a walk under his superintendence was first cousin
to liberty. Some boys roamed ahead, some lagged behind, while Catman
turned over his pages, sounding the return only when it grew dark. The
rumour of the champagne had already intoxicated the boys. There was a
companion and most auspicious rumour that Boddy was going to be absent
on Saturday. If so, we said, we may drink our champagne under Catman's
nose and he be none the wiser. Saddlebank undertook to manage our feast
for us. Coming home over the downs, just upon twilight, Temple and I
saw Saddlebank carrying a long withy upright. We asked him what it was
for. He shouted back: 'It's for fortune. You keep the rear guard.' Then
we saw him following a man and a flock of geese, and imitating the
action of the man with his green wand. As we were ready to laugh at
anything Saddlebank did, we laughed at this. The man walked like one
half asleep, and appeared to wake up now and then to find that he was
right in the middle of his geese, and then he waited, and Saddlebank
waited behind him. Presently the geese passed a lane leading off the
downs. We saw Saddlebank duck his wand in a coaxing way, like an angler
dropping his fly for fish; he made all sorts of curious easy flourishes
against the sky and branched up the lane. We struck after him, little
suspecting that he had a goose in front, but he had; he had cut one of
the loiterers off from the flock; and to see him handle his wand on
either side his goose, encouraging it to go forward, and remonstrating,
and addressing it in bits of Latin, and the creature pattering stiff
and astonished, sent us in a dance of laughter.

'What have you done, old Saddle?' said Temple, though it was perfectly
clear what Saddlebank had done.

'I've carved off a slice of Michaelmas,' said Saddlebank, and he hewed
the air to flick delicately at his goose's head.

'What do you mean—a slice?' said we.

We wanted to be certain the goose was captured booty. Saddlebank would
talk nothing but his fun. Temple fetched a roaring sigh:

'Oh! how good this goose 'd be with our champagne.'

The idea seized and enraptured me. 'Saddlebank, I'll buy him off you,'
I said.

'Chink won't flavour him,' said Saddlebank, still at his business:
'here, you two, cut back by the down and try all your might to get a
dozen apples before Catman counts heads at the door, and you hold your
tongues.'

We shot past the man with the geese—I pitied him—clipped a corner of
the down, and by dint of hard running reached the main street, mad for
apples, before Catman appeared there. Apples, champagne, and cakes were
now provided; all that was left to think of was the goose. We glorified
Saddlebank's cleverness to the boys.

'By jingo! what a treat you'll have,' Temple said among them, bursting
with our secret.

Saddlebank pleaded that he had missed his way on presenting himself ten
minutes after time. To me and Temple he breathed of goose, but he
shunned us; he had no fun in him till Saturday afternoon, when Catman
called out to hear if we were for cricket or a walk.

'A walk on the downs,' said Saddlebank.

Temple and I echoed him, and Saddlebank motioned his hand as though he
were wheedling his goose along. Saddlebank spoke a word to my
commissioners. I was to leave the arrangements for the feast to him, he
said. John Salter was at home unwell, so Saddlebank was chief. No
sooner did we stand on the downs than he gathered us all in a circle,
and taking off his cap threw in it some slips of paper. We had to draw
lots who should keep by Catman out of twenty-seven; fifteen blanks were
marked. Temple dashed his hand into the cap first 'Like my luck,' he
remarked, and pocketed both fists as he began strutting away to hide
his desperation at drawing a blank. I bought a substitute for him at
the price of half-a-crown,—Drew, a fellow we were glad to get rid of;
he wanted five shillings. The feast was worth fifty, but to haggle
about prices showed the sneak. He begged us to put by a taste for him;
he was groaned out of hearing. The fifteen looked so wretched when they
saw themselves divided from us that I gave them a shilling a-piece to
console them. They took their instructions from Saddlebank as to how
they were to surround Catman, and make him fancy us to be all in his
neighbourhood; and then we shook hands, they requesting us feebly to
drink their healths, and we saying, ay, that we would.

Temple was in distress of spirits because of his having been
ignominiously bought off. Saddlebank, however, put on such a pace that
no one had leisure for melancholy. 'I'll get you fellows up to boiling
point,' said he. There was a tremendously hot sun overhead. On a sudden
he halted, exclaiming: 'Cooks and gridirons! what about sage and
onions?' Only Temple and I jumped at the meaning of this. We drew lots
for a messenger, and it was miserable to behold an unfortunate fellow
touch Saddlebank's hand containing the notched bit of stick, and find
himself condemned to go and buy sage and onions somewhere, without
knowing what it was for how could he guess we were going to cook a raw
goose! The lot fell to a boy named Barnshed, a big slow boy, half way
up every class he was in, but utterly stupid out of school; which made
Saddlebank say: 'They'll take it he's the bird that wants stuffing.'
Barnshed was directed where to rejoin us. The others asked why he was
trotted after sage and onions. 'Because he's an awful goose,' said
Saddlebank.

Temple and I thought the word was out and hurrahed, and back came
Barnshed. We had a task in persuading him to resume his expedition, as
well as Saddlebank to forgive us. Saddlebank's anger was excessive. We
conciliated him by calling him captain, and pretending to swear an oath
of allegiance. He now led us through a wood on to some fields down to a
shady dell, where we were to hold the feast in privacy. He did not
descend it himself. Vexatious as it was to see a tramp's tent there, we
nevertheless acknowledged the respectful greeting of the women and the
man with a few questions about tentpegs, pots, and tin mugs. Saddlebank
remained aloft, keeping a look-out for the day-school fellows,
Chaunter, Davis, and Bystop, my commissioners. They did not keep us
waiting long. They had driven to the spot in a cart, according to
Saddlebank's directions. Our provisions were in three large hampers. We
praised their forethought loudly at the sight of an extra bottle of
champagne, with two bottles of ginger-wine, two of currant, two of
raisin, four pint bottles of ale, six of ginger-beer, a Dutch cheese, a
heap of tarts, three sally-lunns, and four shillingsworth of toffy.
Temple and I joined our apples to the mass: a sight at which some of
the boys exulted aloud. The tramp-women insisted on spreading things
out for us: ten yards off their children squatted staring: the man
smoked and chaffed us.

At last Saddlebank came running over the hill-side, making as if he
meant to bowl down what looked a black body of a baby against the sky,
and shouting, 'See, you fellows, here's a find!' He ran through us,
swinging his goose up to the hampers, saying that he had found the
goose under a furze-bush. While the words were coming out of his mouth,
he saw the tramps, and the male tramp's eyes and his met.

The man had one eyebrow and his lips at one corner screwed in a queer
lift: he winked slowly. 'Odd! ain't it?' he said.

Saddlebank shouldered round on us, and cried, 'Confound you fellows!
here's a beastly place you've pitched upon.' His face was the colour of
scarlet in patches.

'Now, I call it a beautiful place,' said the man, 'and if you finds
gooses hereabouts growing ready for the fire, all but plucking, why,
it's a bountiful place, I call it.'

The women tried to keep him silent. But for them we should have moved
our encampment. 'Why, of course, young gentlemen, if you want to eat
the goose, we'll pluck it for you and cook it for you, all nice,' they
said. 'How can young gentlemen do that for theirselves?'

It was clear to us we must have a fire for the goose. Certain
observations current among us about the necessity to remove the goose's
inside, and not to lose the giblets, which even the boy who named them
confessed his inability to recognize, inclined the majority to accept
the woman's proposal. Saddlebank said it was on our heads, then.

To revive his good humour, Temple uncorked a bottle of champagne. The
tramp-woman lent us a tin mug, and round it went. One boy said, 'That's
a commencement'; another said, 'Hang old Rippenger.' Temple snapped his
fingers, and Bystop, a farmer's son, said, 'Well, now I've drunk
champagne; I meant to before I died!' Most of the boys seemed puzzled
by it. As for me, my heart sprang up in me like a colt turned out of
stables to graze. I determined that the humblest of my retainers should
feed from my table, and drink to my father's and Heriot's honour, and I
poured out champagne for the women, who just sipped, and the man, who
vowed he preferred beer. A spoonful of the mashed tarts I sent to each
of the children. Only one, the eldest, a girl about a year older than
me, or younger, with black eyebrows and rough black hair, refused to
eat or drink.

'Let her bide, young gentlemen,' said a woman; 'she's a regular
obstinate, once she sets in for it.'

'Ah!' said the man, 'I've seen pigs druv, and I've seen iron bent
double. She's harder 'n both, once she takes 't into her head.'

'By jingo, she's pig-iron!' cried Temple, and sighed, 'Oh, dear old
Heriot!'

I flung myself beside him to talk of our lost friend.

A great commotion stirred the boys. They shrieked at beholding their
goose vanish in a pot for stewing. They wanted roast-goose, they
exclaimed, not boiled; who cared for boiled goose! But the woman asked
them how it was possible to roast a goose on the top of wood-flames,
where there was nothing to hang it by, and nothing would come of it
except smoked bones!

The boys groaned in consternation, and Saddlebank sowed discontent by
grumbling, 'Now you see what your jolly new acquaintances have done for
you.'

So we played at catch with the Dutch cheese, and afterwards bowled it
for long-stopping, when, to the disgust of Saddlebank and others, down
ran the black-haired girl and caught the ball clean at wicket-distance.
As soon as she had done it she was ashamed, and slunk away.

The boys called out, 'Now, then, pig-iron!'

One fellow enraged me by throwing an apple that hit her in the back. We
exchanged half-a-dozen blows, whereupon he consented to apologize, and
roared, 'Hulloa, pig-iron, sorry if I hurt you.'

Temple urged me to insist on the rascal's going on his knees for
flinging at a girl.

'Why,' said Chaunter, 'you were the first to call her pig-iron.'

Temple declared he was a blackguard if he said that. I made the girl
take a piece of toffy.

'Aha!' Saddlebank grumbled, 'this comes of the precious company you
would keep in spite of my caution.'

The man told us to go it, for he liked to observe young gentlemen
enjoying themselves. Temple tossed him a pint bottle of beer, with an
injunction to him to shut his trap.

'Now, you talk my mother tongue,' said the man; 'you're what goes by
the name of a learned gentleman. Thank ye, sir. You'll be a counsellor
some day.'

'I won't get off thieves, I can tell you,' said Temple. He was the son
of a barrister.

'Nor you won't help cook their gooses for them, may be,' said the man.
'Well, kindness is kindness, all over the world.'

The women stormed at him to command him not to anger the young
gentlemen, for Saddlebank was swearing awfully in an undertone. He
answered them that he was the mildest lamb afloat.

Despairing of the goose, we resolved to finish the cold repast awaiting
us. The Dutch cheese had been bowled into bits. With a portion of the
mashed tarts on it, and champagne, it tasted excellently; toffy to
follow. Those boys who chose ginger-wine had it, and drank, despised.
The ginger-beer and ale, apples and sallylunns, were reserved for
supper. My mind became like a driving sky, with glimpses of my father
and Heriot bursting through.

'If I'm not a prince, I'm a nobleman,' I said to Temple.

He replied, 'Army or Navy. I don't much care which. We're sure of a
foreign war some time. Then you'll see fellows rise: lieutenant,
captain, colonel, General—quick as barrels popping at a bird. I should
like to be Governor of Gibraltar.'

'I'll come and see you, Temple,' said I.

'Done! old Richie,' he said, grasping my hand warmly.

'The truth is, Temple,' I confided to him, 'I've an uncle—I mean a
grandfather—of enormous property; he owns half Hampshire, I believe,
and hates my father like poison. I won't stand it. You've seen my
father, haven't you? Gentlemen never forget their servants, Temple.
Let's drink lots more champagne. I wish you and I were knights riding
across that country there, as they used to, and you saying, “I wonder
whether your father's at home in the castle expecting our arrival.”'

'The Baron!' said Temple. 'He's like a Baron, too. His health. Your
health, sir! It's just the wine to drink it in, Richie. He's one of the
men I look up to. It's odd he never comes to see you, because he's fond
of you; the right sort of father! Big men can't be always looking after
little boys. Not that we're so young, though, now. Lots of fellows of
our age have done things fellows write about. I feel—' Temple sat up
swelling his chest to deliver an important sentiment; 'I feel
uncommonly thirsty.'

So did I. We attributed it to the air of the place, Temple going so far
as to say that it came off the chalk, which somehow stuck in the
throat.

'Saddleback, don't look glum,' said Temple. 'Lord, Richie, you should
hear my father plead in Court with his wig on. They used to say at home
I was a clever boy when I was a baby. Saddleback, you've looked glum
all the afternoon.'

'Treat your superiors respectfully,' Saddlebank retorted.

The tramp was irritating him. That tramp had never left off smoking and
leaning on his arm since we first saw him. Two boys named Hackman and
Montague, not bad fellows, grew desirous of a whiff from his pipe. They
had it, and lay down silent, back to back. Bystop was led away in a
wretched plight. Two others, Paynter and Ashworth, attacked the apples,
rendered desperate by thirst. Saddlebank repelled them furiously. He
harangued those who might care to listen.

'You fellows, by George! you shall eat the goose, I tell you. You've
spoilt everything, and I tell you, whether you like it or not, you
shall have apples with it, and sage and onions too. I don't ask for
thanks. And I propose to post outposts in the wood to keep watch.'

He wanted us to draw lots again. His fun had entirely departed from
him; all he thought of was seeing the goose out of the pot. I had a
feeling next to hatred for one who could talk of goose. Temple must
have shared it.

'We've no real captain now dear old Heriot's gone,' he said. 'The
school's topsy-turvy: we're like a lot of things rattled in a box. Oh,
dear! how I do like a good commander. On he goes, you after him, never
mind what happens.'

A pair of inseparable friends, Happitt and Larkins, nicknamed
Happy-go-Lucky, were rolling arm-in-arm, declaring they were perfectly
sober, and, for a proof of it, trying to direct their feet upon a lump
of chalk, and marching, and missing it. Up came Chaunter to them: 'Fat
goose?' he said—no more. Both the boys rushed straight as far as they
could go; both sung out, 'I'm done!' and they were.

Temple and I contemplated these proceedings as matters belonging to the
ordinary phenomena of feasting. We agreed that gentlemen were always
the last to drop, and were assured, therefore, of our living out the
field; but I dreaded the moment of the goose's appearance, and I think
he did also. Saddlebank's pertinacity in withholding the cool
ginger-beer and the apples offended us deeply; we should have conspired
against him had we reposed confidence in our legs and our tongues.

Twilight was around us. The tramp-children lay in little bundles in one
tent; another was being built by the women and the girl. Overhead I
counted numbers of stars, all small; and lights in the valley—lights of
palaces to my imagination. Stars and tramps seemed to me to go
together. Houses imprisoned us, I thought a lost father was never to be
discovered by remaining in them. Plunged among dark green leaves,
smelling wood-smoke, at night; at morning waking up, and the world
alight, and you standing high, and marking the hills where you will see
the next morning and the next, morning after morning, and one morning
the dearest person in the world surprising you just before you wake: I
thought this a heavenly pleasure. But, observing the narrowness of the
tents, it struck me there would be snoring companions. I felt so
intensely sensitive, that the very idea of a snore gave me tremours and
qualms: it was associated with the sense of fat. Saddlebank had the lid
of the pot in his hand; we smelt the goose, and he cried, 'Now for
supper; now for it! Halloa, you fellows!'

'Bother it, Saddlebank, you'll make Catman hear you,' said Temple,
wiping his forehead.

I perspired coldly.

'Catman! He's been at it for the last hour and a half,' Saddlebank
replied.

One boy ran up: he was ready, and the only one who was. Presently
Chaunter rushed by.

'Barnshed's in custody; I'm away home,' he said, passing.

We stared at the black opening of the dell.

'Oh, it's Catman; we don't mind him,' Saddlebank reassured us; but we
heard ominous voices, and perceived people standing over a prostrate
figure. Then we heard a voice too well known to us. It said, 'The
explanation of a pupil in your charge, Mr. Catman, being sent barefaced
into the town—a scholar of mine—for sage and onions...'

'Old Rippenger!' breathed Temple.

We sat paralyzed. Now we understood the folly of despatching a donkey
like Barnshed for sage and onions.

'Oh, what asses we have been!' Temple continued. 'Come along—we run for
it! Come along, Richie! They're picking up the fellows like windfalls.'

I told him I would not run for it; in fact, I distrusted my legs; and
he was staggering, answering Saddlebank's reproaches for having come
among tramps.

'Temple, I see you, sir!' called Mr. Rippenger. Poor Temple had
advanced into the firelight.

With the instinct to defeat the master, I crawled in the line of the
shadows to the farther side of a tent, where I felt a hand clutch mine.
'Hide me,' said I; and the curtain of the tent was raised. After
squeezing through boxes and straw, I lay flat, covered by a mat
smelling of abominable cheese, and felt a head outside it on my chest.
Several times Mr. Rippenger pronounced my name in the way habitual to
him in anger: 'Rye!'

Temple's answer was inaudible to me. Saddlebank spoke, and other boys,
and the man and the woman. Then a light was thrust in the tent, and the
man said, 'Me deceive you, sir! See for yourself, to satisfy yourself.
Here's our little uns laid warm, and a girl there, head on the mat,
going down to join her tribe at Lipcombe, and one of our women sleeps
here, and all told. But for you to suspect me of combining—Thank ye,
sir. You've got my word as a man.'

The light went away. My chest was relieved of the weight on it. I sat
up, and the creature who had been kind to me laid mat and straw on the
ground, and drew my head on her shoulder, where I slept fast.




CHAPTER VII.
A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD


I woke very early, though I had taken kindly to my pillow, as I found
by my having an arm round my companion's neck, and her fingers
intertwisted with mine. For awhile I lay looking at her eyes, which had
every imaginable light and signification in them; they advised me to
lie quiet, they laughed at my wonder, they said, 'Dear little fellow!'
they flashed as from under a cloud, darkened, flashed out of it, seemed
to dip in water and shine, and were sometimes like a view into a
forest, sometimes intensely sunny, never quite still. I trusted her,
and could have slept again, but the sight of the tent stupefied me; I
fancied the sky had fallen, and gasped for air; my head was extremely
dizzy too; not one idea in it was kept from wheeling. This confusion of
my head flew to my legs when, imitating her, I rose to go forth. In a
fit of horror I thought, 'I've forgotten how to walk!'

Summoning my manful resolution, I made the attempt to step across the
children swaddled in matting and straw and old gowns or petticoats. The
necessity for doing it with a rush seized me after the first step. I
pitched over one little bundle, right on to the figure of a sleeping
woman. All she did was to turn round, murmuring, 'Naughty Jackie.' My
companion pulled me along gravely, and once in the air, with a good
breath of it in my chest, I felt tall and strong, and knew what had
occurred. The tent where I had slept struck me as more curious than my
own circumstances. I lifted my face to the sky; it was just sunrise,
beautiful; bits of long and curling cloud brushed any way close on the
blue, and rosy and white, deliciously cool; the grass was all grey, our
dell in shadow, and the tops of the trees burning, a few birds
twittering.

I sucked a blade of grass.

'I wish it was all water here,' I said.

'Come and have a drink and a bathe,' said my companion.

We went down the dell and over a juniper slope, reminding me of my day
at John Salter's house and the last of dear Heriot. Rather to my shame,
my companion beat me at running; she was very swift, and my legs were
stiff.

'Can you swim?' she asked me.

'I can row, and swim, and fence, and ride, and fire a pistol,' I said.

'Oh, dear,' said she, after eyeing me enviously. I could see that I had
checked a recital of her accomplishments.

We arrived at a clear stream in a gentleman's park, where grass rolled
smooth as sea-water on a fine day, and cows and horses were feeding.

'I can catch that horse and mount him,' she said.

I was astonished.

'Straddle?'

She nodded down for 'Yes.'

'No saddle?'

She nodded level for 'No.'

My respect for her returned. But she could not swim.

'Only up to my knees,' she confessed.

'Have a look at me,' said I; and I stripped and shot into the water,
happy as a fish, and thinking how much nicer it was than champagne. My
enjoyment made her so envious that she plucked off her stockings, and
came in as far as she dared. I called to her. 'You're like a cow,' and
she showed her teeth, bidding me not say that.

'A cow! a cow!' I repeated, in my superior pleasure.

She spun out in a breath, 'If you say that, I'll run away with every
bit of your clothes, and you'll come out and run about naked, you
will.'

'Now I float,' was my answer, 'now I dive'; and when I came up she
welcomed me with a big bright grin.

A smart run in the heat dried me. I dressed, finding half my money on
the grass. She asked me to give her one of those bits—a shilling. I
gave her two, upon which she asked me, invitingly, if ever I tossed. I
replied that I never tossed for money; but she had caught a shilling,
and I could not resist guessing 'heads,' and won; the same with her
second shilling. She handed them to me sullenly, sobbing, yet she would
not take them back.

'By-and-by you give me another two,' she said, growing lively again. We
agreed that it would be a good thing if we entered the village and
bought something. None of the shops were open. We walked through the
churchyard. I said, 'Here's where dead people are buried.'

'I'll dance if you talk about dead people,' said she, and began
whooping at the pitch of her voice. On my wishing to know why she did
it, her reply was that it was to make the dead people hear. My feelings
were strange: the shops not open, and no living people to be seen. We
climbed trees, and sat on a branch talking of birds' eggs till hunger
drove us to the village street, where, near the public-house, we met
the man-tramp, who whistled.

He was rather amusing. He remarked that he put no questions to me,
because he put no question to anybody, because answers excited him
about subjects that had no particular interest to him, and did not
benefit him to the extent of a pipe of 'tobacco; and all through not
being inquisitive, yesterday afternoon he had obtained, as if it had
been chucked into his lap, a fine-flavoured fat goose honourably for
his supper, besides bottles of ale, bottles of ginger-pop, and a
fair-earned half-crown. That was through his not being inquisitive, and
he was not going to be inquisitive now, knowing me for a gentleman: my
master had tipped him half-a-crown.

Fortunately for him, and perhaps for my liberty, he employed a verb
marvellously enlightening to a schoolboy. I tipped him another
half-crown. He thanked me, observing that there were days when you lay
on your back and the sky rained apples; while there were other days
when you wore your fingers down to the first joint to catch a flea.
Such was Fortune!

In a friendly manner he advised me to go to school; if not there, then
to go home. My idea, which I had only partly conceived, was to have a
look at Riversley over a hedge, kiss my aunt Dorothy unaware, and fly
subsequently in search of my father. Breakfast, however, was my
immediate thought. He and the girl sat down to breakfast at the inn as
my guests. We ate muttonchops and eggs, and drank coffee. After it,
though I had no suspicions, I noticed that the man grew thoughtful. He
proposed to me, supposing I had no objection against slow travelling,
to join company for a couple of days, if I was for Hampshire, which I
stated was the county I meant to visit.

'Well then, here now, come along, d'ye see, look,' said he, 'I mustn't
be pounced on, and no missing young gentleman in my society, and me
took half-a-crown for his absence; that won't do. You get on pretty
well with the gal, and that's a screaming farce: none of us do. Lord!
she looks down on such scum as us. She's gipsy blood, true sort;
everything's sausages that gets into their pockets, no matter what it
was when it was out. Well then, now, here, you and the gal go t' other
side o' Bed'lming, and you wait for us on the heath, and we's be there
to comfort ye 'fore dark. Is it a fister?'

He held out his hand; I agreed; and he remarked that he now counted a
breakfast in the list of his gains from never asking questions.

I was glad enough to quit the village in a hurry, for the driver of the
geese, or a man dreadfully resembling him, passed me near the
public-house, and attacked my conscience on the cowardly side, which
is, I fear, the first to awaken, and always the liveliest half while we
are undisciplined. I would have paid him money, but the idea of a
conversation with him indicated the road back to school. My companion
related her history. She belonged to a Hampshire gipsy tribe, and had
been on a visit to a relative down in the East counties, who died on
the road, leaving her to be brought home by these tramps: she called
them mumpers, and made faces when she spoke of them. Gipsies, she said,
were a different sort: gipsies camped in gentlemen's parks; gipsies,
horses, fiddles, and the wide world—that was what she liked. The wide
world she described as a heath, where you looked and never saw the end
of it. I let her talk on. For me to talk of my affairs to a girl
without bonnet and boots would have been absurd. Otherwise, her society
pleased me: she was so like a boy, and unlike any boy I knew.

My mental occupation on the road was to calculate how many hill-tops I
should climb before I beheld Riversley. The Sunday bells sounded homely
from village to village as soon as I was convinced that I heard no
bells summoning boarders to Rippenger's school. The shops in the
villages continued shut; however, I told the girl they should pay me
for it next day, and we had an interesting topic in discussing as to
the various things we would buy. She was for bright ribands and
draper's stuff, I for pastry and letter-paper. The smell of people's
dinners united our appetites. Going through a village I saw a man
carrying a great baked pie, smelling overpoweringly, so that to ask him
his price for it was a natural impulse with me. 'What! sell my Sunday
dinner?' he said, and appeared ready to drop the dish. Nothing stopped
his staring until we had finished a plateful a-piece and some beer in
his cottage among his family. He wanted to take me in alone. 'She's a
common tramp,' he said of the girl.

'That's a lie,' she answered.

Of course I would not leave her hungry outside, so in the end he
reluctantly invited us both, and introduced us to his wife.

'Here's a young gentleman asks a bit o' dinner, and a young
I-d'n-know-what's after the same; I leaves it to you, missus.'

His wife took it off his shoulders in good humour, saying it was lucky
she made the pie big enough for her family and strays. They would not
accept more than a shilling for our joint repast. The man said that was
the account to a farthing, if I was too proud to be a poor man's guest,
and insisted on treating him like a public. Perhaps I would shake hands
at parting? I did cordially, and remembered him when people were not so
civil. They wanted to know whether we had made a runaway match of it.
The fun of passing a boys'-school and hearing the usher threaten to
punish one fellow for straying from ranks, entertained me immensely. I
laughed at them just as the stupid people we met laughed at me, which
was unpleasant for the time; but I knew there was not a single boy who
would not have changed places with me, only give him the chance, though
my companion was a gipsy girl, and she certainly did look odd company
for a gentleman's son in a tea-garden and public-house parlour. At
nightfall, however, I was glad of her and she of me, and we walked hand
in hand. I narrated tales of Roman history. It was very well for her so
say, 'I'll mother you,' as we lay down to sleep; I discovered that she
would never have hooted over churchyard graves in the night. She
confessed she believed the devil went about in the night. Our bed was a
cart under a shed, our bed-clothes fern-leaves and armfuls of straw.
The shafts of the cart were down, so we lay between upright and level,
and awakening in the early light I found our four legs hanging over the
seat in front. 'How you have been kicking!' said I. She accused me of
the same. Next minute she pointed over the side of the cart, and I saw
the tramp's horse and his tents beneath a broad roadside oak-tree. Her
face was comical, just like a boy's who thinks he has escaped and is
caught. 'Let's run,' she said. Preferring positive independence, I
followed her, and then she told me that she had overheard the tramp
last night swearing I was as good as a fistful of half-crowns lost to
him if he missed me. The image of Rippenger's school overshadowed me at
this communication. With some melancholy I said: 'You'll join your
friends, won't you?'

She snapped her fingers: 'Mumpers!' and walked on carelessly.

We were now on the great heaths. They brought the memory of my father
vividly; the smell of the air half inclined me to turn my steps toward
London, I grew so full of longing for him. Nevertheless I resolved to
have one gaze at Riversley, my aunt Dorothy, and Sewis, the old
grey-brown butler, and the lamb that had grown a sheep; wonderful
contrasts to my grand kings of England career. My first clear
recollection of Riversley was here, like an outline of a hill seen
miles away. I might have shed a tear or two out of love for my father,
had not the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I
could not but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me.
Suppose I joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had
brothers, horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the
fiddle? Suppose I learnt their language and went about with them and
became king of the gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not
encourage this ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of
the gipsies or a queen either. 'We fool people,' she said, and offended
me, for our school believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman,
used to sing a song of a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that
my schoolfellows were fools, every one of them. I accused her of
telling lies. She grinned angrily. 'I don't tell 'em to friends,' she
said. We had a quarrel. The truth was, I was enraged at the sweeping
out of my prospects of rising to distinction among the gipsies. After
breakfast at an inn, where a waiter laughed at us to our faces, and we
fed scowling, shy, and hungry, we had another quarrel. I informed her
of my opinion that gipsies could not tell fortunes.

'They can, and you come to my mother and my aunt, and see if they can't
tell your fortune,' said she, in a fury.

'Yes, and that's how they fool people,' said I. I enjoyed seeing the
flash of her teeth. But my daring of her to look me in the eyes and
swear on her oath she believed the fortunes true ones, sent her into a
fit of sullenness.

'Go along, you nasty little fellow, your shadow isn't half a yard,' she
said, and I could smile at that; my shadow stretched half across the
road. We had a quarrelsome day wherever we went; rarely walking close
together till nightfall, when she edged up to my hand, with, 'I say,
I'll keep you warm to-night, I will.' She hugged me almost too tight,
but it was warm and social, and helped to the triumph of a feeling I
had that nothing made me regret running away from Rippenger's school.

An adventure befell us in the night. A farmer's wife, whom we asked for
a drink of water after dark, lent us an old blanket to cover us in a
dry ditch on receiving our promise not to rob the orchard. An old
beggar came limping by us, and wanted to share our covering. My
companion sank right under the blanket to peer at him through one of
its holes. He stood enormous above me in the moonlight, like an
apparition touching earth and sky.

'Cold, cold,' he whined: 'there's ne'er a worse off but there's a
better off. Young un!' His words dispersed the fancy that he was
something horrible, or else my father in disguise going to throw off
his rags, and shine, and say he had found me. 'Are ye one, or are ye
two?' he asked.

I replied that we were two.

'Then I'll come and lie in the middle,' said he.

'You can't; there's no room,' I sang out.

'Lord,' said he, 'there's room for any reckoning o' empty stomachs in a
ditch.'

'No, I prefer to be alone: good-night,' said I.

'Why!' he exclaimed, 'where ha' you been t' learn language? Halloa!'

'Please, leave me alone; it's my intention to go to sleep,' I said,
vexed at having to conciliate him; he had a big stick.

'Oho!' went the beggar. Then he recommenced:

'Tell me you've stole nothing in your life! You've stole a gentleman's
tongue, I knows the ring o' that. How comes you out here? Who's your
mate there down below? Now, see, I'm going to lift my stick.'

At these menacing words the girl jumped out of the blanket, and I
called to him that I would rouse the farmer.

'Why... because I'm goin' to knock down a apple or two on your head?'
he inquired, in a tone of reproach. 'It's a young woman you've got
there, eh? Well, odd grows odder, like the man who turned three
shillings into five. Now, you gi' me a lie under your blanket, I'll
knock down a apple apiece. If ever you've tasted gin, you's say a apple
at night's a cordial, though it don't intoxicate.'

The girl whispered in my ear, 'He's lame as ducks.' Her meaning seized
me at once; we both sprang out of the ditch and ran, dragging our
blanket behind us. He pursued, but we eluded him, and dropped on a
quiet sleeping-place among furzes. Next morning, when we took the
blanket to the farm-house, we heard that the old wretch had traduced
our characters, and got a breakfast through charging us with the
robbery of the apple-tree. I proved our innocence to the farmer's wife
by putting down a shilling. The sight of it satisfied her. She combed
my hair, brought me a bowl of water and a towel, and then gave us a
bowl of milk and bread, and dismissed us, telling me I had a fair face
and dare-devil written on it: as for the girl, she said of her that she
knew gipsies at a glance, and what God Almighty made them for there was
no guessing. This set me thinking all through the day, 'What can they
have been made for?' I bought a red scarf for the girl, and other
things she fixed her eyes on, but I lost a great deal of my feeling of
fellowship with her. 'I dare say they were made for fun,' I thought,
when people laughed at us now, and I laughed also.

I had a day of rollicking laughter, puzzling the girl, who could only
grin two or three seconds at a time, and then stared like a dog that
waits for his master to send him off again running, the corners of her
mouth twitching for me to laugh or speak, exactly as a dog might wag
his tail. I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of
unaccountable creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had
escaped from school.

We loitered half the morning round a cricketers' booth in a field,
where there was moderately good cricketing. The people thought it of
first-rate quality. I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out
either eleven in an hour and a half. One of the men frightened me by
saying, 'By Gearge! I'll in with you into a gig, and off with you after
that ther' faller.' He pretended to mean it, and started up. I watched
him without flinching. He remarked that if I 'had not cut my lucky from
school, and tossed my cap for a free life, he was ——' whatever may be
expressed by a slap on the thigh. We played a single-wicket side game,
he giving me six runs, and crestfallen he was to find himself beaten;
but, as I let him know, one who had bowled to Heriot for hours and
stood against Saddlebank's bowling, was a tough customer, never mind
his age.

This man offered me his friendship. He made me sit and eat beside him
at the afternoon dinner of the elevens, and sent platefuls of food to
the girl, where she was allowed to squat; and said he, 'You and I'll
tie a knot, and be friends for life.'

I replied, 'With pleasure.'

We nodded over a glass of ale. In answer to his questions, I stated
that I liked farms, I would come and see his farm, I would stay with
him two or three days, I would give him my address if I had one, I was
on my way to have a look at Riversley Grange.

'Hey!' says he, 'Riversley Grange! Well, to be sure now! I'm a tenant
of Squire Beltham's, and a right sort of landlord, too.'

'Oh!' says I, 'he's my grandfather, but I don't care much about him.'

'Lord!' says he. 'What! be you the little boy, why, Master Harry
Richmond that was carried off in the night, and the old squire shut up
doors for a fortnight, and made out you was gone in a hearse! Why, I
know all about you, you see. And back you are, hurrah! The squire 'll
be hearty, that he will. We've noticed a change in him ever since you
left. Gout's been at his leg, off and on, a deal shrewder. But he rides
to hounds, and dines his tenants still, that he does; he's one o' th'
old style. Everything you eat and drink's off his estate, the day he
dines his tenants. No humbug 'bout old Squire Beltham.

I asked him if Sewis was alive.

'Why, old Sewis,' says he, 'you're acquainted with old Sewis? Why, of
course you are. Yes, old Sewis's alive, Master Harry. And you bet me at
single-wicket! That's be something to relate to 'em all. By Gearge, if
I didn't think I'd got a nettle in my fist when I saw you pitch into my
stumps. Dash it! thinks I. But th' old squire 'll be proud of you, that
he will. My farm lies three miles away. You look at a crow flying due
South-east five minutes from Riversley, and he's over Throckham farm,
and there I'll drive ye to-night, and to-morrow, clean and tidy out o'
my wife's soap and water, straight to Riversley. Done, eh? My name's
Eckerthy. No matter where you comes from, here you are, eh, Master
Harry? And I see you last time in a donkey-basket, and here you come in
breeches and defy me to singlewicket, and you bet me too!'

He laughed for jollity. An extraordinary number of emotions had
possession of me: the most intelligible one being a restless vexation
at myself, as the principal person concerned, for not experiencing
anything like the farmer's happiness. I preferred a gipsy life to
Riversley. Gipsies were on the road, and that road led to my father. I
endeavoured to explain to Farmer Eckerthy that I was travelling in this
direction merely to have a short look at Riversley; but it was
impossible; he could not understand me. The more I tried, the more he
pressed me to finish my glass of ale, which had nothing to do with it.
I drank, nevertheless, and I suppose said many funny things in my
anxiety that the farmer should know what I meant; he laughed enough.

While he was fielding against the opposite eleven, the tramp came into
the booth, and we had a match of cunning.

'Schoolmaster's out after you, young gentleman,' said he, advising me
to hurry along the road if I sought to baffle pursuit.

I pretended alarm, and then said, 'Oh, you'll stand by me,' and treated
him to ale.

He assured me I left as many tracks behind me as if I went spilling a
box of lucifer-matches. He was always for my hastening on until I
ordered fresh ale for him. The girl and he grimaced at one another in
contempt. So we remained seeing the game out. By the time the game
ended, the tramp had drunk numbers of glasses of ale.

'A fine-flavoured fat goose,' he counted his gains since the
commencement of our acquaintance, 'bottles of ale and ginger-pop, two
half-crowns, more ale, and more to follow, let's hope. You only stick
to your friends, young gentleman, won't you, sir? It's a hard case for
a poor man like me if you don't. We ain't got such chances every
morning of our lives. Do you perceive, sir? I request you to inform me,
do you perceive, sir? I'm muddled a bit, sir, but a man must look after
his interests.'

I perceived he was so muddled as to be unable to conceal that his
interests were involved in my capture; but I was merry too. Farmer
Eckerthy dealt the tramp a scattering slap on the back when he returned
to the booth, elated at having beaten the enemy by a single run.

'Master Harry Richmond go to Riversley to his grandfather in your
company, you scoundrel!' he cried in a rage, after listening to him. 'I
mean to drive him over. It's a comfortable ten-mile, and no more. But I
say, Master Harry, what do you say to a peck o' supper?'

He communicated to me confidentially that he did not like to seem to
slink away from the others, who had made up their minds to stop and
sup; so we would drive home by moonlight, singing songs. And so we did.
I sat beside the farmer, the girl scrambled into the hinder part of the
cart, and the tramp stood moaning, 'Oh dear! oh dear! you goes away to
Riversley without your best friend.'

I tossed him a shilling. We sang beginnings and ends of songs. The
farmer looked at the moon, and said, 'Lord! she stares at us!' Then he
sang:

'The moon is shining on Latworth lea,
And where'll she see such a jovial three
As we, boys, we? And why is she pale?
It's because she drinks water instead of ale.'


'Where's the remainder? There's the song—!

“Oh! handsome Miss Gammon
Has married Lord Mammon,
And jilted her suitors,
All Cupid's sharpshooters,
And gone in a carriage
And six to her marriage,
Singing hey! for I've landed my salmon, my salmon!”


Where's the remainder? I heard it th' only time I ever was in London
town, never rested till I'd learnt it, and now it's clean gone. What's
come to me?'

He sang to 'Mary of Ellingmere' and another maid of some place, and a
loud song of Britons.

It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and
silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep. The girl had
roused me, and we crept down from the cart. Horse and farmer were quite
motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway. Looking across fields
and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour,
and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said
to myself, 'No, no, that's not Riversley; I'm sure it isn't'; though
the certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me. I ran down the
fields to the park and the bright little river, and gazed. When I could
say, 'Yes, it is Riversley!' I turned away, hurt even to a sense of
smarting pain, without knowing the cause. I dare say it is true, as the
girl declared subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit. I
dropped, and I may have rolled my body and cried. An indefinite
resentment at Riversley was the feeling I grew conscious of after very
fast walking. I would not have accepted breakfast there.

About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her
people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set
up a cry, 'Kiomi! Kiomi!' like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth
made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The
strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word,
rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all
round,—not musical, but catching and incessant,—gave me an idea that I
had fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones. They
welcomed me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second
or so. I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a
fire in the middle of the tent.

Kiomi was my companion's name. She had sisters Adeline and Eveleen, and
brothers Osric and William, and she had a cousin a prizefighter.
'That's what I'll be,' said I. Fiddling for money was not a prospect
that charmed me, though it was pleasant lying in Kiomi's arms to hear
Osric play us off to sleep; it was like floating down one of a number
of visible rivers; I could see them converging and breaking away while
I floated smoothly, and a wonderful fair country nodded drowsy. From
that to cock-crow at a stride. Sleep was no more than the passage
through the arch of a canal. Kiomi and I were on the heath before
sunrise, jumping gravel-pits, chasing sandpipers, mimicking pewits; it
seemed to me I had only just heard the last of Osric's fiddle when
yellow colour filled in along the sky over Riversley. The curious dark
thrill of the fiddle in the tent by night seemed close up behind the
sun, and my quiet fancies as I lay dropping to sleep, followed me like
unobtrusive shadows during daylight, or, to speak truthfully, till
about dinner-time, when I thought of nothing but the great stew-pot. We
fed on plenty; nicer food than Rippenger's, minus puddings. After
dinner I was ready for mischief. My sensations on seeing Kiomi beg of a
gentleman were remarkable. I reproached her. She showed me sixpence
shining in the palm of her hand. I gave her a shilling to keep her from
it. She had now got one and sixpence, she said: meaning, I supposed
upon reflection, that her begging had produced that sum, and therefore
it was a good thing. The money remaining in my pocket amounted to five
shillings and a penny. I offered it to Kiomi's mother, who refused to
accept it; so did the father, and Osric also. I might think of them,
they observed, on my return to my own house: they pointed at Riversley.
'No,' said I, 'I shan't go there, you may be sure.' The women grinned,
and the men yawned. The business of the men appeared to be to set to
work about everything as if they had a fire inside them, and then to
stretch out their legs and lie on their backs, exactly as if the fire
had gone out. Excepting Osric's practice on the fiddle, and the
father's bringing in and leading away of horses, they did little work
in my sight but brown themselves in the sun. One morning Osric's
brother came to our camp with their cousin the prizefighter—a young man
of lighter complexion, upon whom I gazed, remembering John Thresher's
reverence for the heroical profession. Kiomi whispered some story
concerning her brother having met the tramp. I did not listen; I was
full of a tempest, owing to two causes: a studious admiration of the
smart young prizefighter's person, and wrathful disgust at him for
calling Kiomi his wife, and telling her he was prepared to marry her as
soon as she played her harp like King David. The intense folly of his
asking a girl to play like David made me despise him, but he was
splendidly handsome and strong, and to see him put on the gloves for a
spar with big William, Kiomi's brother, and evade and ward the huge
blows, would have been a treat to others besides old John of Dipwell
Farm. He had the agile grace of a leopard; his waistcoat reminded me of
one; he was like a piece of machinery in free action. Pleased by my
enthusiasm, he gave me a lesson, promising me more.

'He'll be champion some day,' said Kiomi, at gnaw upon an apple he had
given her.

I knocked the apple on the ground, and stamped on it. She slapped my
cheek. In a minute we stood in a ring. I beheld the girl actually
squaring at me.

'Fight away,' I said, to conceal my shame, and imagining I could slip
from her hits as easily as the prizefighter did from big William's. I
was mistaken.

'Oh! you think I can't defend myself,' said Kiomi; and rushed in with
one, two, quick as a cat, and cool as a statue.

'Fight, my merry one; she takes punishment,' the prizefighter sang out.
'First blood to you, Kiomi; uncork his claret, my duck; straight at the
nozzle, he sees more lamps than shine in London, I warrant. Make him
lively, cook him; tell him who taught you; a downer to him, and I'll
marry you to-morrow!'

I conceived a fury against her as though she had injured me by
appearing the man's property—and I was getting the worst of it; her
little fists shot straight and hard as bars of iron; she liked
fighting; she was at least my match. To avoid the disgrace of seriously
striking her, or of being beaten at an open exchange of blows, I made a
feint, and caught her by the waist and threw her, not very neatly, for
I fell myself in her grip. They had to pluck her from me by force.

'And you've gone a course of tuition in wrestling, squire?' the
prizefighter said to me rather savagely.

The others were cordial, and did not snarl at me for going to the
ropes, as he called it. Kiomi desired to renew the conflict. I said
aloud:

'I never fight girls, and I tell you I don't like their licking me.'

'Then you come down to the river and wash your face,' said she, and
pulled me by the fingers, and when she had washed my face clear of
blood, kissed me. I thought she tasted of the prizefighter.

Late in the afternoon Osric proposed that he and I and the prizefighter
should take a walk. I stipulated for Kiomi to be of the party, which
was allowed, and the gipsy-women shook my hand as though I had been
departing on a long expedition, entreating me not to forget them, and
never to think evil of poor gipsy-folk.

'Why, I mean to stay with you,' said I.

They grinned delightedly, and said I must be back to see them break up
camp in the evening. Every two or three minutes Kiomi nudged my elbow
and pointed behind, where I saw the women waving their coloured
neckerchiefs. Out of sight of our tents we came in view of the tramp.
Kiomi said, 'Hide!' I dived into a furze dell. The tramp approached,
calling out for news of me. Now at Rippenger's school, thanks to
Heriot, lying was not the fashion; still I had heard boys lie, and they
can let it out of their mouths like a fish, so lively, simple, and
solid, that you could fancy a master had asked them for it and they
answered, 'There it is.' But boys cannot lie in one key spontaneously,
a number of them to the same effect, as my friends here did. I was off,
they said; all swung round to signify the direction of my steps; my
plans were hinted at; particulars were not stated on the plea that
there should be no tellings; it was remarked that I ought to have fair
play and 'law.' Kiomi said she hoped he would not catch me. The tramp
winced with vexation, and the gipsies chaffed him. I thanked them in my
heart for their loyal conduct. Creeping under cover of the dell I
passed round to the road over a knoll of firs as quick as my feet could
carry me, and had just cried, 'Now I'm safe'; when a lady stepping from
a carriage on the road, caught me in her arms and hugged me blind. It
was my aunt Dorothy.




CHAPTER VIII.
JANET ILCHESTER


I was a prisoner, captured by fraud, and with five shillings and a
penny still remaining to me for an assurance of my power to enjoy
freedom. Osric and Kiomi did not show themselves on the road, they
answered none of my shouts.

'She is afraid to look me in the face,' I said, keeping my anger on
Kiomi.

'Harry, Harry,' said my aunt, 'they must have seen me here; do you
grieve, and you have me, dear?'

Her eager brown eyes devoured me while I stood panting to be happy, if
only I might fling my money at Kiomi's feet, and tell her, 'There, take
all I have; I hate you!' One minute I was curiously perusing the soft
shade of a moustache on my aunt's upper lip; the next, we jumped into
the carriage, and she was my dear aunt Dorothy again, and the world
began rolling another way.

The gipsies had made an appointment to deliver me over to my aunt;
Farmer Eckerthy had spoken of me to my grandfather; the tramp had
fetched Mr. Rippenger on the scene. Rippenger paid the tramp, I dare
say; my grandfather paid Rippenger's bill and for Saddlebank's goose;
my aunt paid the gipsies, and I think it doubtful that they handed the
tramp a share, so he came to the end of his list of benefits from not
asking questions.

I returned to Riversley more of a man than most boys of my age, and
more of a child. A small child would not have sulked as I did at
Kiomi's behaviour; but I met my grandfather's ridiculous politeness
with a man's indifference.

'So you're back, sir, are you!'

'I am, sir.'

'Ran like a hare, 'stead of a fox, eh?'

'I didn't run like either, sir.'

'Do you ride?'

'Yes, sir; a horse.'

That was his greeting and how I took it. I had not run away from him,
so I had a quiet conscience.

He said, shortly after, 'Look here; your name is Harry Richmond in my
house—do you understand? My servants have orders to call you Master
Harry Richmond, according to your christening. You were born here, sir,
you will please to recollect. I'll have no vagabond names here'—he
puffed himself hot, muttering, 'Nor vagabond airs neither.'

I knew very well what it meant. A sore spirit on my father's behalf
kept me alive to any insult of him; and feeling that we were
immeasurably superior to the Beltham blood, I merely said, apart to old
Sewis, shrugging my shoulders, 'The squire expects me to recollect
where I was born. I'm not likely to forget his nonsense.'

Sewis, in reply, counselled me to direct a great deal of my attention
to the stables, and drink claret with the squire in the evening, things
so little difficult to do that I moralized reflectively, 'Here's a way
of gaining a relative's affection!' The squire's punctilious regard for
payments impressed me, it is true. He had saved me from the disgrace of
owing money to my detested schoolmaster; and, besides, I was under his
roof, eating of his bread. My late adventurous life taught me that I
incurred an obligation by it. Kiomi was the sole victim of my anger
that really seemed to lie down to be trampled on, as she deserved for
her unpardonable treachery.

By degrees my grandfather got used to me, and commenced saying in
approval of certain of my performances, 'There's Beltham in
that—Beltham in that!' Once out hunting, I took a nasty hedge and ditch
in front of him; he bawled proudly, 'Beltham all over!' and praised me.
At night, drinking claret, he said on a sudden, 'And, egad, Harry, you
must jump your head across hedges and ditches, my little fellow. It
won't do, in these confounded days, to have you clever all at the wrong
end. In my time, good in the saddle was good for everything; but now
you must get your brains where you can—pick here, pick there—and sell
'em like a huckster; some do. Nature's gone—it's damned artifice rules,
I tell ye; and a squire of our country must be three parts lawyer to
keep his own. You must learn; by God, sir, you must cogitate; you must
stew at books and maps, or you'll have some infernal upstart taking the
lead of you, and leaving you nothing but the whiff of his tail.' He
concluded, 'I'm glad to see you toss down your claret, my boy.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I never was a beggar,' I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I retired promptly, but the squire had heard her.

'Back, sir!' he shouted, swearing by this and that. 'You slink from a
kiss, and you're Beltham blood? Back to her, lad. Take it. Up with her
in your arms or down on your knees. Take it manfully, somehow. See
there, she's got it ready for you.'

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

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

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

'Don't treat animals like your dolls,' said I.

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

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

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

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

'You're a fiery young fellow, I suspect,' he said, when he had
recovered his natural temper. 'I like you for it; pluck's Beltham. Have
a will of your own. Sweat out the bad blood. Here, drink my health,
Harry. You're three parts Beltham, at least, and it'll go hard if
you're not all Beltham before I die. Old blood always wins that race, I
swear. We're the oldest in the county. Damn the mixing. My father never
let any of his daughters marry, if he could help it, nor'll I, bar
rascals. Here's to you, young Squire Beltham. Harry Lepel Beltham—does
that suit ye? Anon, anon, as they say in the play. Take my name, and
drop the Richmond—no, drop the subject: we'll talk of it by-and-by.'

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




CHAPTER IX.
AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED


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

I said, 'No, my father's.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And now you think you are flattering m

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