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The History of Pendennis

by William Makepeace Thackeray · English · Gutenberg #7265 · 2,001,179 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The History of Pendennis

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7265]
                Most recently updated: September 24, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7265

Credits: Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS ***




THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS

His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy

By William Makepeace Thackeray


Contents

 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I. Shows how First Love may interrupt Breakfast
 CHAPTER II. A Pedigree and other Family Matters
 CHAPTER III. In which Pendennis appears as a very young Man indeed
 CHAPTER IV. Mrs. Haller
 CHAPTER V. Mrs. Haller at Home
 CHAPTER VI. Contains both Love and War
 CHAPTER VII. In which the Major makes his Appearance
 CHAPTER VIII. In which Pen is kept waiting at the Door, while the Reader is informed who little Laura was.
 CHAPTER IX. In which the Major opens the Campaign
 CHAPTER X. Facing the Enemy
 CHAPTER XI. Negotiation
 CHAPTER XII. In which a Shooting Match is proposed
 CHAPTER XIII. A Crisis
 CHAPTER XIV. In which Miss Fotheringay makes a new Engagement
 CHAPTER XV. The happy Village
 CHAPTER XVI. More Storms in the Puddle
 CHAPTER XVII. Which concludes the first Part of this History
 CHAPTER XVIII. Alma Mater
 CHAPTER XIX. Pendennis of Boniface
 CHAPTER XX. Rake’s Progress
 CHAPTER XXI. Flight after Defeat
 CHAPTER XXII. Prodigal’s Return
 CHAPTER XXIII. New Faces
 CHAPTER XXIV. A Little Innocent
 CHAPTER XXV. Contains both Love and Jealousy
 CHAPTER XXVI. A House full of Visitors
 CHAPTER XXVII. Contains some Ball-practising
 CHAPTER XXVIII. Which is both Quarrelsome and Sentimental
 CHAPTER XXIX. Babylon
 CHAPTER XXX. The Knights of the Temple
 CHAPTER XXXI. Old and new Acquaintances
 CHAPTER XXXII. In which the Printer’s Devil comes to the Door
 CHAPTER XXXIII. Which is passed in the Neighbourhood of Ludgate Hill
 CHAPTER XXXIV. In which the History still hovers about Fleet Street
 CHAPTER XXXV. Dinner in the Row
 CHAPTER XXXVI. The Pall Mall Gazette
 CHAPTER XXXVII. Where Pen appears in Town and Country
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. In which the Sylph reappears
 CHAPTER XXXIX. In which Colonel Altamont appears and disappears
 CHAPTER XL. Relates to Mr. Harry Foker’s Affairs
 CHAPTER XLI. Carries the Reader both to Richmond and Greenwich
 CHAPTER XLII. Contains a novel Incident
 CHAPTER XLIII. Alsatia
 CHAPTER XLIV. In which the Colonel narrates some of his Adventures
 CHAPTER XLV. A Chapter of Conversations
 CHAPTER XLVI. Miss Amory’s Partners
 CHAPTER XLVII. Monseigneur s’amuse
 CHAPTER XLVIII. A Visit of Politeness
 CHAPTER XLIX. In Shepherd’s Inn
 CHAPTER L. In or near the Temple Garden
 CHAPTER LI. The happy Village again
 CHAPTER LII. Which had very nearly been the last of the Story
 CHAPTER LIII. A critical Chapter
 CHAPTER LIV. Convalescence
 CHAPTER LV. Fanny’s Occupation’s gone
 CHAPTER LVI. In which Fanny engages a new Medical Man
 CHAPTER LVII. Foreign Ground
 CHAPTER LVIII. “Fairoaks to let”
 CHAPTER LIX. Old Friends
 CHAPTER LX. Explanations
 CHAPTER LXI. Conversations
 CHAPTER LXII. The Way of the World
 CHAPTER LXIII. Which accounts perhaps for Chapter LXI.
 CHAPTER LXIV. Phyllis and Corydon
 CHAPTER LXV. Temptation
 CHAPTER LXVI. In which Pen begins his Canvass
 CHAPTER LXVII. In which Pen begins to doubt about his Election
 CHAPTER LXVIII. In which the Major is bidden to Stand and Deliver
 CHAPTER LXIX. In which the Major neither yields his Money nor his Life
 CHAPTER LXX. In which Pendennis counts his Eggs
 CHAPTER LXXI. Fiat Justitia
 CHAPTER LXXII. In which the Decks begin to clear
 CHAPTER LXXIII. Mr. and Mrs. Sam Huxter
 CHAPTER LXXIV. Shows how Arthur had better have taken a Return-ticket
 CHAPTER LXXV. A Chapter of Match-making
 CHAPTER LXXVI. Exeunt Omnes




TO DR. JOHN ELLIOTSON

My Dear Doctor,

Thirteen months ago, when it seemed likely that this story had come to
a close, a kind friend brought you to my bedside, whence, in all
probability, I never should have risen but for your constant
watchfulness and skill. I like to recall your great goodness and
kindness (as well as many acts of others, showing quite a surprising
friendship and sympathy) at that time, when kindness and friendship
were most needed and welcome.

And as you would take no other fee but thanks, let me record them here
in behalf of me and mine, and subscribe myself

Yours most sincerely and gratefully,

W. M. THACKERAY.




PREFACE


If this kind of composition, of which the two years’ product is now
laid before the public, fail in art, as it constantly does and must, it
at least has the advantage of a certain truth and honesty, which a work
more elaborate might lose. In his constant communication with the
reader, the writer is forced into frankness of expression, and to speak
out his own mind and feelings as they urge him. Many a slip of the pen
and the printer, many a word spoken in haste, he sees and would recall
as he looks over his volume. It is a sort of confidential talk between
writer and reader, which must often be dull, must often flag. In the
course of his volubility, the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay
bare his own weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities. And as we judge of a
man’s character, after long frequenting his society, not by one speech,
or by one mood or opinion, or by one day’s talk, but by the tenor of
his general bearing and conversation; so of a writer, who delivers
himself up to you perforce unreservedly, you say, Is he honest? Does he
tell the truth in the main? Does he seem actuated by a desire to find
out and speak it? Is he a quack, who shams sentiment, or mouths for
effect? Does he seek popularity by claptraps or other arts? I can no
more ignore good fortune than any other chance which has befallen me. I
have found many thousands more readers than I ever looked for. I have
no right to say to these, You shall not find fault with my art, or fall
asleep over my pages; but I ask you to believe that this person writing
strives to tell the truth. If there is not that, there is nothing.

Perhaps the lovers of ‘excitement’ may care to know, that this book
began with a very precise plan, which was entirely put aside. Ladies
and gentlemen, you were to have been treated, and the writer’s and the
publisher’s pocket benefited, by the recital of the most active
horrors. What more exciting than a ruffian (with many admirable
virtues) in St. Giles’s, visited constantly by a young lady from
Belgravia? What more stirring than the contrasts of society? the
mixture of slang and fashionable language? the escapes, the battles,
the murders? Nay, up to nine o’clock this very morning, my poor friend,
Colonel Altamont, was doomed to execution, and the author only relented
when his victim was actually at the window.

The ‘exciting’ plan was laid aside (with a very honourable forbearance
on the part of the publishers), because, on attempting it, I found that
I failed from want of experience of my subject; and never having been
intimate with any convict in my life, and the manners of ruffians and
gaol-birds being quite unfamiliar to me, the idea of entering into
competition with M. Eugène Sue was abandoned. To describe a real
rascal, you must make him so horrible that he would be too hideous to
show; and unless the painter paints him fairly, I hold he has no right
to show him at all.

Even the gentlemen of our age—this is an attempt to describe one of
them, no better nor worse than most educated men—even these we cannot
show as they are, with the notorious foibles and selfishness of their
lives and their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no
writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost
power a MAN. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional
simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art. Many ladies
have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the course of
the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by
temptation.

My object was to say, that he had the passions to feel, and the
manliness and generosity to overcome them. You will not hear—it is best
to know it—what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the
clubs, colleges, mess-rooms,—what is the life and talk of your sons. A
little more frankness than is customary has been attempted in this
story; with no bad desire on the writer’s part, it is hoped, and with
no ill consequence to any reader. If truth is not always pleasant, at
any rate truth is best, from whatever chair—from those whence graver
writers or thinkers argue, as from that at which the story-teller sits
as he concludes his labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.

KENSINGTON, Nov. 26th, 1850.




PENDENNIS




CHAPTER I.
Shows how First Love may interrupt Breakfast


One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came
over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a
certain Club in Pall Mall, of which he was a chief ornament. As he was
one of the finest judges of wine in England, and a man of active,
dominating, and inquiring spirit, he had been very properly chosen to
be a member of the Committee of this Club, and indeed was almost the
manager of the institution; and the stewards and waiters bowed before
him as reverentially as to a Duke or a Field-Marshal.

At a quarter past ten the Major invariably made his appearance in the
best blacked boots in all London, with a checked morning cravat that
never was rumpled until dinner time, a buff waistcoat which bore the
crown of his sovereign on the buttons, and linen so spotless that Mr.
Brummel himself asked the name of his laundress, and would probably
have employed her had not misfortunes compelled that great man to fly
the country. Pendennis’s coat, his white gloves, his whiskers, his very
cane, were perfect of their kind as specimens of the costume of a
military man _en retraite_. At a distance, or seeing his back merely,
you would have taken him to be not more than thirty years old: it was
only by a nearer inspection that you saw the factitious nature of his
rich brown hair, and that there were a few crow’s-feet round about the
somewhat faded eyes of his handsome mottled face. His nose was of the
Wellington pattern. His hands and wristbands were beautifully long and
white. On the latter he wore handsome gold buttons given to him by his
Royal Highness the Duke of York, and on the others more than one
elegant ring, the chief and largest of them being emblazoned with the
famous arms of Pendennis.

He always took possession of the same table in the same corner of the
room, from which nobody ever now thought of ousting him. One or two mad
wags and wild fellows had in former days, and in freak or bravado,
endeavoured twice or thrice to deprive him of this place; but there was
a quiet dignity in the Major’s manner as he took his seat at the next
table, and surveyed the interlopers, which rendered it impossible for
any man to sit and breakfast under his eye; and that table—by the fire,
and yet near the window—became his own. His letters were laid out there
in expectation of his arrival, and many was the young fellow about town
who looked with wonder at the number of those notes, and at the seals
and franks which they bore. If there was any question about etiquette,
society, who was married to whom, of what age such and such a duke was,
Pendennis was the man to whom every one appealed. Marchionesses used to
drive up to the Club, and leave notes for him, or fetch him out. He was
perfectly affable. The young men liked to walk with him in the Park or
down Pall Mall; for he touched his hat to everybody, and every other
man he met was a lord.

The Major sate down at his accustomed table then, and while the waiters
went to bring him his toast and his hot newspaper, he surveyed his
letters through his gold double eye-glass. He carried it so gaily, you
would hardly have known it was spectacles in disguise, and examined one
pretty note after another, and laid them by in order. There were large
solemn dinner cards, suggestive of three courses and heavy
conversation; there were neat little confidential notes, conveying
female entreaties; there was a note on thick official paper from the
Marquis of Steyne, telling him to come to Richmond to a little party at
the Star and Garter, and speak French, which language the Major
possessed very perfectly; and another from the Bishop of Ealing and
Mrs. Trail, requesting the honour of Major Pendennis’s company at
Ealing House, all of which letters Pendennis read gracefully, and with
the more satisfaction, because Glowry, the Scotch surgeon, breakfasting
opposite to him, was looking on, and hating him for having so many
invitations, which nobody ever sent to Glowry.

These perused, the Major took out his pocket-book to see on what days
he was disengaged, and which of these many hospitable calls he could
afford to accept or decline.

He threw over Cutler, the East India Director, in Baker Street, in
order to dine with Lord Steyne and the little French party at the Star
and Garter—the Bishop he accepted, because, though the dinner was slow,
he liked to dine with bishops—and so went through his list and disposed
of them according to his fancy or interest. Then he took his breakfast
and looked over the paper, the gazette, the births and deaths, and the
fashionable intelligence, to see that his name was down among the
guests at my Lord So-and-so’s fête, and in the intervals of these
occupations carried on cheerful conversation with his acquaintances
about the room.

Among the letters which formed Major Pendennis’s budget for that
morning there was only one unread, and which lay solitary and apart
from all the fashionable London letters, with a country postmark and a
homely seal. The superscription was in a pretty delicate female hand,
and though marked ‘Immediate’ by the fair writer, with a strong dash of
anxiety under the word, yet the Major had, for reasons of his own,
neglected up to the present moment his humble rural petitioner, who to
be sure could hardly hope to get a hearing among so many grand folks
who attended his levee. The fact was, this was a letter from a female
relative of Pendennis, and while the grandees of her brother’s
acquaintance were received and got their interview, and drove off, as
it were, the patient country letter remained for a long time waiting
for an audience in the ante-chamber under the slop-bason.

At last it came to be this letter’s turn, and the Major broke a seal
with ‘Fairoaks’ engraved upon it, and ‘Clavering St. Mary’s’ for a
postmark. It was a double letter, and the Major commenced perusing the
envelope before he attacked the inner epistle.

“Is it a letter from another _Jook_,” growled Mr. Glowry, inwardly,
“Pendennis would not be leaving that to the last, I’m thinking.”

“My dear Major Pendennis,” the letter ran, “I beg and implore you to
come to me _immediately_”—very likely, thought Pendennis, and Steyne’s
dinner to-day—“I am in the very greatest grief and perplexity. My
dearest boy, who has been hitherto everything the fondest mother could
wish, is grieving me _dreadfully_. He has formed—I can hardly write
it—a passion, an infatuation,”—the Major grinned—“for an actress who
has been performing here. She is at least twelve years older than
Arthur—who will not be eighteen till next February—and the wretched boy
insists upon marrying her.”

“Hay! What’s making Pendennis swear now?”—Mr. Glowry asked of himself,
for rage and wonder were concentrated in the Major’s open mouth, as he
read this astounding announcement.

“Do, my dear friend,” the grief-stricken lady went on, “come to me
instantly on the receipt of this; and, as Arthur’s guardian, entreat,
command, the wretched child to give up this most deplorable
resolution.” And, after more entreaties to the above effect, the writer
concluded by signing herself the Major’s ‘unhappy affectionate sister,
Helen Pendennis.’

“Fairoaks, Tuesday”—the Major concluded, reading the last words of the
letter—“A d——d pretty business at Fairoaks, Tuesday; now let us see
what the boy has to say;” and he took the other letter, which was
written in a great floundering boy’s hand, and sealed with the large
signet of the Pendennises, even larger than the Major’s own, and with
supplementary wax sputtered all round the seal, in token of the
writer’s tremulousness and agitation.

The epistle ran thus:

“FAIROAKS, _Monday, Midnight_.


“MY DEAR UNCLE,


In informing you of my engagement with Miss Costigan, daughter of J.
Chesterfield Costigan, Esq., of Costiganstown, but, perhaps, better
known to you under her professional name of Miss Fotheringay, of the
Theatres Royal Drury Lane and Crow Street, and of the Norwich and Welsh
Circuit, I am aware that I make an announcement which cannot, according
to the present prejudices of society at least, be welcome to my family.
My dearest mother, on whom, God knows, I would wish to inflict no
needless pain, is deeply moved and grieved, I am sorry to say, by the
intelligence which I have this night conveyed to her. I beseech you, my
dear Sir, to come down and reason with her and console her. Although
obliged by poverty to earn an honourable maintenance by the exercise of
her splendid talents, Miss Costigan’s family is as ancient and noble as
our own. When our ancestor, Ralph Pendennis, landed with Richard II. in
Ireland, my Emily’s forefathers were kings of that country. I have the
information from Mr. Costigan, who, like yourself, is a military man.

“It is in vain I have attempted to argue with my dear mother, and prove
to her that a young lady of irreproachable character and lineage,
endowed with the most splendid gifts of beauty and genius, who devotes
herself to the exercise of one of the noblest professions, for the
sacred purpose of maintaining her family, is a being whom we should all
love and reverence, rather than avoid;—my poor mother has prejudices
which it is impossible for my logic to overcome, and refuses to welcome
to her arms one who is disposed to be her most affectionate daughter
through life.

“Although Miss Costigan is some years older than myself, that
circumstance does not operate as a barrier to my affection, and I am
sure will not influence its duration. A love like mine, Sir, I feel, is
contracted once and for ever. As I never had dreamed of love until I
saw her—I feel now that I shall die without ever knowing another
passion. It is the fate of my life. It was Miss C.’s own delicacy which
suggested that the difference of age, which I never felt, might operate
as a bar to our union. But having loved once, I should despise myself,
and be unworthy of my name as a gentleman, if I hesitated to abide by
my passion: if I did not give all where I felt all, and endow the woman
who loves me fondly with my whole heart and my whole fortune.

“I press for a speedy marriage with my Emily—for why, in truth, should
it be delayed? A delay implies a doubt, which I cast from me as
unworthy. It is impossible that my sentiments can change towards
Emily—that at any age she can be anything but the sole object of my
love. Why, then, wait? I entreat you, my dear Uncle, to come down and
reconcile my dear mother to our union, and I address you as a man of
the world, _qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes_, who will not
feel any of the weak scruples and fears which agitate a lady who has
scarcely ever left her village.

“Pray, come down to us immediately. I am quite confident that—apart
from considerations of fortune—you will admire and approve of my Emily.

“Your affectionate Nephew,
“ARTHUR PENDENNIS, JR.”


When the Major had concluded the perusal of this letter, his
countenance assumed an expression of such rage and horror that Glowry,
the surgeon-official, felt in his pocket for his lancet, which he
always carried in his card-case, and thought his respected friend was
going into a fit. The intelligence was indeed sufficient to agitate
Pendennis. The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten
years his senior,—a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. “The
mother has spoiled the young rascal,” groaned the Major inwardly, “with
her cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a
tragedy queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall
not dare show my head!” And he thought with an inexpressible pang that
he must give up Lord Steyne’s dinner at Richmond, and must lose his
rest and pass the night in an abominable tight mail-coach, instead of
taking pleasure, as he had promised himself, in some of the most
agreeable and select society in England.

And he must not only give up this but all other engagements for some
time to come. Who knows how long the business might detain him. He
quitted his breakfast table for the adjoining writing-room, and there
ruefully wrote off refusals to the Marquis, the Earl, the Bishop, and
all his entertainers; and he ordered his servant to take places in the
mail-coach for that evening, of course charging the sum which he
disbursed for the seats to the account of the widow and the young
scapegrace of whom he was guardian.




CHAPTER II.
A Pedigree and other Family Matters


Early in the Regency of George the Magnificent, there lived in a small
town in the west of England, called Clavering, a gentleman whose name
was Pendennis. There were those alive who remembered having seen his
name painted on a board, which was surmounted by a gilt pestle and
mortar over the door of a very humble little shop in the city of Bath,
where Mr. Pendennis exercised the profession of apothecary and surgeon;
and where he not only attended gentlemen in their sick-rooms, and
ladies at the most interesting periods of their lives, but would
condescend to sell a brown-paper plaster to a farmer’s wife across the
counter,—or to vend tooth-brushes, hair-powder, and London perfumery.
For these facts a few folks at Clavering could vouch, where people’s
memories were more tenacious, perhaps, than they are in a great
bustling metropolis.

And yet that little apothecary who sold a stray customer a pennyworth
of salts, or a more fragrant cake of Windsor soap, was a gentleman of
good education, and of as old a family as any in the whole county of
Somerset. He had a Cornish pedigree which carried the Pendennises up to
the time of the Druids, and who knows how much farther back? They had
intermarried with the Normans at a very late period of their family
existence, and they were related to all the great families of Wales and
Brittany. Pendennis had had a piece of University education too, and
might have pursued that career with great honour, but that in his
second year at Cambridge his father died insolvent, and poor Pen was
obliged to betake himself to the pestle and apron. He always detested
the trade, and it was only necessity, and the offer of his mother’s
brother, a London apothecary of low family, into which Pendennis’s
father had demeaned himself by marrying, that forced John Pendennis
into so odious a calling.

He quickly after his apprenticeship parted from the coarse-minded
practitioner his relative, and set up for himself at Bath with his
modest medical ensign. He had for some time a hard struggle with
poverty; and it was all he could do to keep the shop and its gilt
ornaments in decent repair, and his bed-ridden mother in comfort: but
Lady Ribstone happening to be passing to the Rooms with an intoxicated
Irish chairman who bumped her ladyship up against Pen’s very door-post,
and drove his chair-pole through the handsomest pink bottle in the
surgeon’s window, alighted screaming from her vehicle, and was
accommodated with a chair in Mr. Pendennis’s shop, where she was
brought round with cinnamon and sal-volatile.

Mr. Pendennis’s manners were so uncommonly gentlemanlike and soothing,
that her ladyship, the wife of Sir Pepin Ribstone, of Codlingbury, in
the county of Somerset, Bart., appointed her preserver, as she called
him, apothecary to her person and family, which was very large. Master
Ribstone coming home for the Christmas holidays from Eton, over-ate
himself and had a fever, in which Mr. Pendennis treated him with the
greatest skill and tenderness. In a word, he got the good graces of the
Codlingbury family, and from that day began to prosper. The good
company of Bath patronised him, and amongst the ladies especially he
was beloved and admired. First his humble little shop became a smart
one: then he discarded the selling of tooth-brushes and perfumery, as
unworthy of a gentleman of an ancient lineage: then he shut up the shop
altogether, and only had a little surgery attended by a genteel young
man: then he had a gig with a man to drive him; and, before her exit
from this world, his poor old mother had the happiness of seeing from
her bedroom window to which her chair was rolled, her beloved John step
into a close carriage of his own, a one-horse carriage it is true, but
with the arms of the family of Pendennis handsomely emblazoned on the
panels. “What would Arthur say now?” she asked, speaking of a younger
son of hers—“who never so much as once came to see my dearest Johnny
through all the time of his poverty and struggles!”

“Captain Pendennis is with his regiment in India, mother,” Mr.
Pendennis remarked, “and, if you please, I wish you would not call me
Johnny before the young man—before Mr. Parkins.”

Presently the day came when she ceased to call her son by the name of
Johnny, or by any other title of endearment or affection; and his house
was very lonely without that kind though querulous voice. He had his
night-bell altered and placed in the room in which the good old lady
had grumbled for many a long year, and he slept in the great large bed
there. He was upwards of forty years old when these events befell;
before the war was over; before George the Magnificent came to the
throne; before this history indeed: but what is a gentleman without his
pedigree? Pendennis, by this time, had his handsomely framed and
glazed, and hanging up in his drawing-room between the pictures of
Codlingbury House in Somersetshire, and St. Boniface’s College,
Cambridge, where he had passed the brief and happy days of his early
manhood. As for the pedigree he had taken it out of a trunk, as
Sterne’s officer called for his sword, now that he was a gentleman and
could show it.

About the time of Mrs. Pendennis’s demise, another of her son’s
patients likewise died at Bath; that virtuous woman, old Lady
Pontypool, daughter of Reginald twelfth Earl of Bareacres, and by
consequence great-grand-aunt to the present Earl, and widow of John
second Lord Pontypool, and likewise of the Reverend Jonas Wales, of the
Armageddon Chapel, Clifton. For the last five years of her life her
ladyship had been attended by Miss Helen Thistlewood, a very distant
relative of the noble house of Bareacres, before mentioned, and
daughter of Lieutenant R. Thistlewood, R.N., killed at the battle of
Copenhagen. Under Lady Pontypool’s roof Miss Thistlewood found a
comfortable shelter, as far as boarding and lodging went, but suffered
under such an infernal tyranny as only women can inflict on, or bear
from, one another: the Doctor, who paid his visits to my Lady Pontypool
at least twice a day, could not but remark the angelical sweetness and
kindness with which the young lady bore her elderly relative’s insults;
and it was, as they were going in the fourth mourning coach to attend
her ladyship’s venerated remains to Bath Abbey, where they now repose,
that he looked at her sweet pale face and resolved upon putting a
certain question to her, the very nature of which made his pulse beat
ninety, at least.

He was older than she by more than twenty years, and at no time the
most ardent of men. Perhaps he had had a love affair in early life
which he had to strangle—perhaps all early love affairs ought to be
strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens: well, at
three-and-forty he was a collected quiet little gentleman in black
stockings with a bald head, and a few days after the ceremony he called
to see her, and, as he felt her pulse, he kept hold of her hand in his,
and asked her where she was going to live now that the Pontypool family
had come down upon the property, which was being nailed into boxes, and
packed into hampers, and swaddled up with haybands, and buried in
straw, and locked under three keys in green baize plate-chests, and
carted away under the eyes of poor Miss Helen,—he asked her where she
was going to live finally.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she said she did not know. She had a
little money. The old lady had left her a thousand pounds, indeed; and
she would go into a boarding-house or into a school: in fine, she did
not know where.

Then Pendennis, looking into her pale face, and keeping hold of her
cold little hand, asked her if she would come and live with him? He was
old compared to—to so blooming a young lady as Miss Thistlewood
(Pendennis was of the grave old complimentary school of gentlemen and
apothecaries), but he was of good birth, and, he flattered himself, of
good principles and temper. His prospects were good, and daily mending.
He was alone in the world, and had need of a kind and constant
companion, whom it would be the study of his life to make happy; in a
word, he recited to her a little speech, which he had composed that
morning in bed, and rehearsed and perfected in his carriage, as he was
coming to wait upon the young lady.

Perhaps if he had had an early love-passage, she too had one day hoped
for a different lot than to be wedded to a little gentleman who rapped
his teeth and smiled artificially, who was laboriously polite to the
butler as he slid upstairs into the drawing-room, and profusely civil
to the lady’s-maid, who waited at the bed-room door; for whom her old
patroness used to ring as for a servant, and who came with even more
eagerness; who got up stories, as he sent in draughts, for his
patient’s amusement and his own profit: perhaps she would have chosen a
different man—but she knew, on the other hand, how worthy Pendennis
was, how prudent, how honourable; how good he had been to his mother,
and constant in his care of her; and the upshot of this interview was,
that she, blushing very much, made Pendennis an extremely low curtsey,
and asked leave to—to consider his very kind proposal.

They were married in the dull Bath season, which was the height of the
season in London. And Pendennis having previously, through a
professional friend, M.R.C.S., secured lodgings in Holles Street,
Cavendish Square, took his wife thither in a chaise and pair; conducted
her to the theatres, the Parks, and the Chapel Royal; showed her the
folks going to a drawing-room, and, in a word, gave her all the
pleasures of the town. He likewise left cards upon Lord Pontypool, upon
the Right Honourable the Earl of Bareacres, and upon Sir Pepin and Lady
Ribstone, his earliest and kindest patrons. Bareacres took no notice of
the cards. Pontypool called, admired Mrs. Pendennis, and said Lady
Pontypool would come and see her, which her ladyship did, per proxy of
John her footman, who brought her card, and an invitation to a concert
five weeks off. Pendennis was back in his little one-horse carriage,
dispensing draughts and pills at that time: but the Ribstones asked him
and Mrs. Pendennis to an entertainment, of which Mr. Pendennis bragged
to the last day of his life.

The secret ambition of Mr. Pendennis had always been to be a gentleman.
It takes much time and careful saving for a provincial doctor, whose
gains are not very large, to lay by enough money wherewith to purchase
a house and land: but besides our friend’s own frugality and prudence,
fortune aided him considerably in his endeavour, and brought him to the
point which he so panted to attain. He laid out some money very
advantageously in the purchase of a house and small estate close upon
the village of Clavering before mentioned. Words cannot describe, nor
did he himself ever care to confess to any one, his pride when he found
himself a real landed proprietor, and could walk over acres of which he
was the master. A lucky purchase which he had made of shares in a
copper-mine added very considerably to his wealth, and he realised with
great prudence while this mine was still at its full vogue. Finally, he
sold his business at Bath, to Mr. Parkins, for a handsome sum of ready
money, and for an annuity to be paid to him during a certain number of
years after he had for ever retired from the handling of the mortar and
pestle.

Arthur Pendennis, his son, was eight years old at the time of this
event, so that it is no wonder that the latter, who left Bath and the
surgery so young, should forget the existence of such a place almost
entirely, and that his father’s hands had ever been dirtied by the
compounding of odious pills, or the preparation of filthy plasters. The
old man never spoke about the shop himself, never alluded to it; called
in the medical practitioner of Clavering to attend his family when
occasion arrived; sunk the black breeches and stockings altogether;
attended market and sessions, and wore a bottle-green coat and brass
buttons with drab gaiters, just as if he had been an English gentleman
all his life. He used to stand at his lodge-gate, and see the coaches
come in, and bow gravely to the guards and coachmen as they touched
their hats and drove by. It was he who founded the Clavering Book Club:
and set up the Samaritan Soup and Blanket Society. It was he who
brought the mail, which used to run through Cacklefield before, away
from that village and through Clavering. At church he was equally
active as a vestryman and a worshipper. At market every Thursday, he
went from pen to stall, looked at samples of oats, and munched corn,
felt beasts, punched geese in the breast, and weighed them with a
knowing air, and did business with the farmers at the Clavering Arms,
as well as the oldest frequenter of that house of call. It was now his
shame, as it formerly was his pride, to be called Doctor, and those who
wished to please him always gave him the title of Squire.

Heaven knows where they came from, but a whole range of Pendennis
portraits presently hung round the Doctor’s oak dining-room; Lelys and
Vandykes he vowed all the portraits to be, and when questioned as to
the history of the originals, would vaguely say they were ‘ancestors of
his.’ You could see by his wife’s looks that she disbelieved in these
genealogical legends, for she generally endeavoured to turn the
conversation when he commenced them. But his little boy believed them
to their fullest extent, and Roger Pendennis of Agincourt, Arthur
Pendennis of Crecy, General Pendennis of Blenheim and Oudenarde, were
as real and actual beings for this young gentleman as—whom shall we
say?—as Robinson Crusoe, or Peter Wilkins, or the Seven Champions of
Christendom, whose histories were in his library.

Pendennis’s fortune, which, at the best, was not above eight hundred
pounds a year, did not, with the best economy and management, permit of
his living with the great folks of the county; but he had a decent
comfortable society of the second-best sort. If they were not the
roses, they lived near the roses, as it were, and had a good deal of
the odour of genteel life. They had out their plate, and dined each
other round in the moonlight nights twice a year, coming a dozen miles
to these festivals; and besides the county, the Pendennises had the
society of the town of Clavering, as much as, nay, more than they
liked: for Mrs. Pybus was always poking about Helen’s conservatories,
and intercepting the operation of her soup-tickets and coal-clubs.
Captain Glanders (H. P., 50th Dragoon Guards) was for ever swaggering
about the Squire’s stables and gardens, and endeavouring to enlist him
in his quarrels with the Vicar, with the Postmaster, with the Reverend
F. Wapshot of Clavering Grammar School, for overflogging his son,
Anglesea Glanders,—with all the village in fine. And Pendennis and his
wife often blessed themselves, that their house of Fairoaks was nearly
a mile out of Clavering, or their premises would never have been free
from the prying eyes and prattle of one or other of the male and female
inhabitants there.

Fairoaks lawn comes down to the little river Brawl, and on the other
side were the plantations and woods (as much as were left of them) of
Clavering Park, Sir Francis Clavering, Bart. The park was let out in
pasture and fed down by sheep and cattle, when the Pendennises came
first to live at Fairoaks. Shutters were up in the house; a splendid
freestone palace, with great stairs, statues, and porticos, whereof you
may see a picture in the ‘Beauties of England and Wales.’ Sir Richard
Clavering, Sir Francis’s grandfather, had commenced the ruin of the
family by the building of this palace: his successor had achieved the
ruin by living in it. The present Sir Francis was abroad somewhere; nor
could anybody be found rich enough to rent that enormous mansion,
through the deserted rooms, mouldy clanking halls, and dismal galleries
of which, Arthur Pendennis many a time walked trembling when he was a
boy. At sunset, from the lawn of Fairoaks, there was a pretty sight: it
and the opposite park of Clavering were in the habit of putting on a
rich golden tinge, which became them both wonderfully. The upper
windows of the great house flamed so as to make your eyes wink; the
little river ran off noisily westward, and was lost in a sombre wood,
behind which the towers of the old abbey church of Clavering (whereby
that town is called Clavering St. Mary’s to the present day) rose up in
purple splendour. Little Arthur’s figure and his mother’s, cast long
blue shadows over the grass; and he would repeat in a low voice (for a
scene of great natural beauty always moved the boy, who inherited this
sensibility from his mother) certain lines beginning, “These are thy
glorious works, Parent of Good; Almighty! thine this universal frame,”
greatly to Mrs. Pendennis’s delight. Such walks and conversation
generally ended in a profusion of filial and maternal embraces; for to
love and to pray were the main occupations of this dear woman’s life;
and I have often heard Pendennis say in his wild way, that he felt that
he was sure of going to heaven, for his mother never could be happy
there without him.

As for John Pendennis, as the father of the family, and that sort of
thing, everybody had the greatest respect for him: and his orders were
obeyed like those of the Medes and Persians. His hat was as well
brushed, perhaps, as that of any man in this empire. His meals were
served at the same minute every day, and woe to those who came late, as
little Pen, a disorderly little rascal, sometimes did. Prayers were
recited, his letters were read, his business dispatched, his stables
and garden inspected, his hen-houses and kennel, his barn and pigstye
visited, always at regular hours. After dinner he always had a nap with
the Globe newspaper on his knee, and his yellow bandanna handkerchief
on his face (Major Pendennis sent the yellow handkerchiefs from India,
and his brother had helped in the purchase of his majority, so that
they were good friends now). And so, as his dinner took place at six
o’clock to a minute, and the sunset business alluded to may be supposed
to have occurred at about half-past seven, it is probable that he did
not much care for the view in front of his lawn windows or take any
share in the poetry and caresses which were taking place there.

They seldom occurred in his presence. However frisky they were before,
mother and child were hushed and quiet when Mr. Pendennis walked into
the drawing-room, his newspaper under his arm. And here, while little
Pen, buried in a great chair, read all the books of which he could lay
hold, the Squire perused his own articles in the ‘Gardener’s Gazette,’
or took a solemn hand at picquet with Mrs. Pendennis, or an occasional
friend from the village.

Pendennis usually took care that at least one of his grand dinners
should take place when his brother, the Major, who, on the return of
his regiment from India and New South Wales, had sold out and gone upon
half-pay, came to pay his biennial visit to Fairoaks. “My brother,
Major Pendennis,” was a constant theme of the retired Doctor’s
conversation. All the family delighted in my brother the Major. He was
the link which bound them to the great world of London, and the
fashion. He always brought down the last news of the nobility, and was
in the constant habit of dining with lords and great folks. He spoke of
such with soldierlike respect and decorum. He would say, “My Lord
Bareacres has been good enough to invite me to Bareacres for the
pheasant shooting,” or, “My Lord Steyne is so kind as to wish for my
presence at Stillbrook for the Easter holidays;” and you may be sure
the whereabouts of my brother the Major was carefully made known by
worthy Mr. Pendennis to his friends at the Clavering Reading room, at
Justice-meetings, or at the County-town. Their carriages would come
from ten miles round to call upon Major Pendennis in his visits to
Fairoaks; the fame of his fashion as a man about town was established
throughout the county. There was a talk of his marrying Miss Hunkle, of
Lilybank, old Hunkle the Attorney’s daughter, with at least fifteen
hundred a-year to her fortune: but my brother the Major refused this
negotiation, advantageous as it might seem to most persons. “As a
bachelor,” he said, “nobody cares how poor I am. I have the happiness
to live with people who are so highly placed in the world, that a few
hundreds or thousands a year more or less can make no difference in the
estimation in which they are pleased to hold me. Miss Hunkle, though a
most respectable lady, is not in possession of either the birth or the
manners, which would entitle her to be received into the sphere in
which I have the honour to move. I shall live and die an old bachelor,
John: and your worthy friend, Miss Hunkle, I have no doubt, will find
some more worthy object of her affection, than a worn-out old soldier
on half-pay.” Time showed the correctness of the surmise of the old man
of the world; Miss Hunkle married a young French nobleman, and is now
at this moment living at Lilybank, under the title of Baroness de
Carambole, having been separated from her wild young scapegrace of a
Baron very shortly after their union.

The Major was a great favourite with almost all the little
establishment of Fairoaks. He was as good-natured as he was well bred,
and had a sincere liking and regard for his sister-in-law, whom he
pronounced, and with perfect truth, to be as fine a lady as any in
England, and an honour to the family. Indeed, Mrs. Pendennis’s tranquil
beauty, her natural sweetness and kindness, and that simplicity and
dignity which a perfect purity and innocence are sure to bestow upon a
handsome woman, rendered her quite worthy of her brother’s praises. I
think it is not national prejudice which makes me believe that a
high-bred English lady is the most complete of all Heaven’s subjects in
this world. In whom else do you see so much grace, and so much virtue;
so much faith, and so much tenderness; with such a perfect refinement
and chastity? And by high-bred ladies I don’t mean duchesses and
countesses. Be they ever so high in station, they can be but ladies,
and no more. But almost every man who lives in the world has the
happiness, let us hope, of counting a few such persons amongst his
circle of acquaintance—women, in whose angelical natures, there is
something awful, as well as beautiful, to contemplate; at whose feet
the wildest and fiercest of us must fall down and humble ourselves;—in
admiration of that adorable purity which never seems to do or to think
wrong.

Arthur Pendennis had the good fortune to have a mother endowed with
these happy qualities. During his childhood and youth, the boy thought
of her as little less than an angel,—as a supernatural being, all
wisdom, love, and beauty. When her husband drove her into the county
town, or to the assize balls or concerts there, he would step into the
assembly with his wife on his arm, and look the great folks in the
face, as much as to say, “Look at that, my lord; can any of you show me
a woman like that?” She enraged some country ladies with three times
her money, by a sort of desperate perfection which they found in her.
Miss Pybus said she was cold and haughty; Miss Pierce, that she was too
proud for her station; Mrs. Wapshot, as a doctor of divinity’s lady,
would have the pas of her, who was only the wife of a medical
practitioner. In the meanwhile, this lady moved through the world quite
regardless of all the comments that were made in her praise or
disfavour. She did not seem to know that she was admired or hated for
being so perfect: but carried on calmly through life, saying her
prayers, loving her family, helping her neighbours, and doing her duty.

That even a woman should be faultless, however, is an arrangement not
permitted by nature, which assigns to us mental defects, as it awards
to us headaches, illnesses, or death; without which the scheme of the
world could not be carried on,—nay, some of the best qualities of
mankind could not be brought into exercise. As pain produces or elicits
fortitude and endurance; difficulty, perseverance; poverty, industry
and ingenuity; danger, courage and what not; so the very virtues, on
the other hand, will generate some vices: and, in fine, Mrs. Pendennis
had that vice which Miss Pybus and Miss Pierce discovered in her,
namely, that of pride; which did not vest itself so much in her own
person, as in that of her family. She spoke about Mr. Pendennis (a
worthy little gentleman enough, but there are others as good as he)
with an awful reverence, as if he had been the Pope of Rome on his
throne, and she a cardinal kneeling at his feet, and giving him
incense. The Major she held to be a sort of Bayard among Majors: and as
for her son Arthur she worshipped that youth with an ardour which the
young scapegrace accepted almost as coolly as the statue of the Saint
in Saint Peter’s receives the rapturous osculations which the faithful
deliver on his toe.

This unfortunate superstition and idol-worship of this good woman was
the cause of a great deal of the misfortune which befell the young
gentleman who is the hero of this history, and deserves therefore to be
mentioned at the outset of his story.

Arthur Pendennis’s schoolfellows at the Greyfriars School state that,
as a boy, he was in no ways remarkable either as a dunce or as a
scholar. He did, in fact, just as much as was required of him, and no
more. If he was distinguished for anything it was for verse-writing:
but was his enthusiasm ever so great, it stopped when he had composed
the number of lines demanded by the regulations (unlike young
Swettenham, for instance, who, with no more of poetry in his
composition than Mr. Wakley, yet would bring up a hundred dreary
hexameters to the master after a half-holiday; or young Fluxmore, who
not only did his own verses, but all the fifth form’s besides). He
never read to improve himself out of school-hours, but, on the
contrary, devoured all the novels, plays, and poetry, on which he could
lay his hands. He never was flogged, but it was a wonder how he escaped
the whipping-post. When he had money he spent it royally in tarts for
himself and his friends; he has been known to disburse nine and
sixpence out of ten shillings awarded to him in a single day. When he
had no funds he went on tick. When he could get no credit he went
without, and was almost as happy. He has been known to take a thrashing
for a crony without saying a word; but a blow, ever so slight from a
friend, would make him roar. To fighting he was averse from his
earliest youth, as indeed to physic, the Greek Grammar, or any other
exertion, and would engage in none of them, except at the last
extremity. He seldom if ever told lies, and never bullied little boys.
Those masters or seniors who were kind to him, he loved with boyish
ardour. And though the Doctor, when he did not know his Horace, or
could not construe his Greek play, said that that boy Pendennis was a
disgrace to the school, a candidate for ruin in this world, and
perdition in the next; a profligate who would most likely bring his
venerable father to ruin and his mother to a dishonoured grave, and the
like—yet as the Doctor made use of these compliments to most of the
boys in the place (which has not turned out an unusual number of felons
and pickpockets), little Pen, at first uneasy and terrified by these
charges, became gradually accustomed to hear them; and he has not, in
fact, either murdered his parents, or committed any act worthy of
transportation or hanging up to the present day.

There were many of the upper boys, among the Cistercians with whom
Pendennis was educated, who assumed all the privileges of men long
before they quitted that seminary. Many of them, for example, smoked
cigars—and some had already begun the practice of inebriation. One had
fought a duel with an Ensign in a marching regiment, in consequence of
a row at the theatre—another actually kept a buggy and horse at a
livery stable in Covent Garden, and might be seen driving any Sunday in
Hyde Park with a groom with squared arms and armorial buttons by his
side. Many of the seniors were in love, and showed each other in
confidence poems addressed to, or letters and locks of hair received
from, young ladies—but Pen, a modest and timid youth, rather envied
these than imitated them as yet. He had not got beyond the theory as
yet—the practice of life was all to come. And by the way, ye tender
mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing
that theory of life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why,
if you could hear those boys of fourteen who blush before mothers and
sneak off in silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among
each other—it would be the women’s turn to blush then. Before he was
twelve years old and if while his mother fancied him an angel of
candour, little Pen had heard talk enough to make him quite awfully
wise upon certain points—and so, Madam, has your pretty little
rosy-cheeked son, who is coming home from school for the ensuing
Christmas holidays. I don’t say that the boy is lost, or that the
innocence has left him which he had from ‘Heaven, which is our home,’
but that the shades of the prison-house are closing very fast over him,
and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him.

Well—Pen had just made his public appearance in a coat with a tail, or
cauda virilis, and was looking most anxiously in his little study-glass
to see if his whiskers were growing, like those of more fortunate
youths his companions; and, instead of the treble voice with which he
used to speak and sing (for his singing voice was a very sweet one, and
he used when little to be made to perform ‘Home, sweet Home,’ ‘My
pretty Page,’ and a French song or two which his mother had taught him,
and other ballads for the delectation of the senior boys), had suddenly
plunged into a deep bass diversified by a squeak, which when he was
called upon to construe in school set the master and scholars
laughing—he was about sixteen years old, in a word, when he was
suddenly called away from his academic studies.

It was at the close of the forenoon school, and Pen had been unnoticed
all the previous part of the morning till now, when the Doctor put him
on to construe in a Greek play. He did not know a word of it, though
little Timmins, his form-fellow, was prompting him with all his might.
Pen had made a sad blunder or two when the awful Chief broke out upon
him.

“Pendennis, sir,” he said, “your idleness is incorrigible and your
stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to
your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your
country. If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all
evil, be really what moralists have represented (and I have no doubt of
the correctness of their opinion), for what a prodigious quantity of
future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed!
Miserable trifler! A boy who construes δε _and_, instead of δε _but_,
at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance,
and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial
ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate. A boy, sir, who does not
learn his Greek play cheats the parent who spends money for his
education. A boy who cheats his parent is not very far from robbing or
forging upon his neighbour. A man who forges on his neighbour pays the
penalty of his crime at the gallows. And it is not such a one that I
pity (for he will be deservedly cut off), but his maddened and
heart-broken parents, who are driven to a premature grave by his
crimes, or, if they live, drag on a wretched and dishonoured old age.
Go on, sir, and I warn you that the very next mistake that you make
shall subject you to the punishment of the rod. Who’s that laughing?
What ill-conditioned boy is there that dares to laugh?” shouted the
Doctor.

Indeed, while the master was making this oration, there was a general
titter behind him in the schoolroom. The orator had his back to the
door of this ancient apartment, which was open, and a gentleman who was
quite familiar with the place, for both Major Arthur and Mr. John
Pendennis had been at the school, was asking the fifth-form boy who
sate by the door for Pendennis. The lad grinning pointed to the culprit
against whom the Doctor was pouring out the thunders of his just
wrath—Major Pendennis could not help laughing. He remembered having
stood under that very pillar where Pen the younger now stood, and
having been assaulted by the Doctor’s predecessor years and years ago.
The intelligence was ‘passed round’ that it was Pendennis’s uncle in an
instant, and a hundred young faces wondering and giggling, between
terror and laughter, turned now to the new-comer and then to the awful
Doctor.

The Major asked the fifth-form boy to carry his card up to the Doctor,
which the lad did with an arch look. Major Pendennis had written on the
card, “I must take A. P. home; his father is very ill.”

As the Doctor received the card, and stopped his harangue with rather a
scared look, the laughter of the boys, half constrained until then,
burst out in a general shout. “Silence!” roared out the Doctor stamping
with his foot. Pen looked up and saw who was his deliverer; the Major
beckoned to him gravely with one of his white gloves, and tumbling down
his books, Pen went across.

The Doctor took out his watch. It was two minutes to one. “We will take
the Juvenal at afternoon school,” he said, nodding to the Captain, and
all the boys understanding the signal gathered up their books and
poured out of the hall.

Young Pen saw by his uncle’s face that something had happened at home.
“Is there anything the matter with my mother?” he said. He could hardly
speak, though, for emotion, and the tears which were ready to start.

“No,” said the Major, “but your father’s very ill. Go and pack your
trunk directly; I have got a postchaise at the gate.”

Pen went off quickly to his boarding-house to do as his uncle bade him;
and the Doctor, now left alone in the schoolroom, came out to shake
hands with his old schoolfellow. You would not have thought it was the
same man. As Cinderella at a particular hour became, from a blazing and
magnificent Princess, quite an ordinary little maid in a grey
petticoat, so, as the clock struck one, all the thundering majesty and
awful wrath of the schoolmaster disappeared.

“There is nothing serious, I hope,” said the Doctor. “It is a pity to
take the boy away unless there is. He is a very good boy, rather idle
and unenergetic, but he is a very honest gentlemanlike little fellow,
though I can’t get him to construe as I wish. Won’t you come in and
have some luncheon? My wife will be very happy to see you.”

But Major Pendennis declined the luncheon. He said his brother was very
ill, had had a fit the day before, and it was a great question if they
should see him alive.

“There’s no other son, is there?” said the Doctor. The Major answered
“No.”

“And there’s a good eh—a good eh—property I believe?” asked the other
in an off-hand way.

“H’m—so so,” said the Major. Whereupon this colloquy came to an end.
And Arthur Pendennis got into the postchaise with his uncle never to
come back to school any more.

As the chaise drove through Clavering, the hostler standing whistling
under the archway of the Clavering Arms, winked the postilion
ominously, as much as to say all was over. The gardener’s wife came and
opened the lodge-gates, and let the travellers through with a silent
shake of the head. All the blinds were down at Fairoaks—the face of the
old footman was as blank when he let them in. Arthur’s face was white
too, with terror more than with grief. Whatever of warmth and love the
deceased man might have had, and he adored his wife and loved and
admired his son with all his heart, he had shut them up within himself;
nor had the boy been ever able to penetrate that frigid outward
barrier. But Arthur had been his father’s pride and glory through life,
and his name the last which John Pendennis had tried to articulate
whilst he lay with his wife’s hand clasping his own cold and clammy
palm, as the flickering spirit went out into the darkness of death, and
life and the world passed away from him.

The little girl, whose face had peered for a moment under the blinds as
the chaise came up, opened the door from the stairs into the hall, and
taking Arthur’s hand silently as he stooped down to kiss her, led him
upstairs to his mother. Old John opened the dining-room door for the
Major. The room was darkened with the blinds down, and surrounded by
all the gloomy pictures of the Pendennises. He drank a glass of wine.
The bottle had been opened for the Squire four days before. His hat was
brushed, and laid on the hall table: his newspapers, and his
letter-bag, with John Pendennis, Esquire, Fairoaks, engraved upon the
brass plate, were there in waiting. The doctor and the lawyer from
Clavering, who had seen the chaise pass through, came up in a gig half
an hour after the Major’s arrival, and entered by the back door. The
former gave a detailed account of the seizure and demise of Mr.
Pendennis, enlarged on his virtues and the estimation in which the
neighbourhood held him; on what a loss he would be to the magistrates’
bench, the County Hospital, etc. Mrs. Pendennis bore up wonderfully, he
said, especially since Master Arthur’s arrival. The lawyer stayed and
dined with Major Pendennis, and they talked business all the evening.
The Major was his brother’s executor, and joint guardian to the boy
with Mrs. Pendennis. Everything was left unreservedly to her, except in
case of a second marriage,—an occasion which might offer itself in the
case of so young and handsome a woman, Mr. Tatham gallantly said, when
different provisions were enacted by the deceased. The Major would of
course take entire superintendence of everything under this most
impressive and melancholy occasion. Aware of this authority, old John
the footman, when he brought Major Pendennis the candle to go to bed,
followed afterwards with the plate-basket; and the next morning brought
him the key of the hall clock—the Squire always used to wind it up of a
Thursday, John said. Mrs. Pendennis’s maid brought him messages from
her mistress. She confirmed the doctor’s report, of the comfort which
Master Arthur’s arrival had caused to his mother.

What passed between that lady and the boy is not of import. A veil
should be thrown over those sacred emotions of love and grief. The
maternal passion is a sacred mystery to me. What one sees symbolised in
the Roman churches in the image of the Virgin Mother with a bosom
bleeding with love, I think one may witness (and admire the Almighty
bounty for) every day. I saw a Jewish lady, only yesterday, with a
child at her knee, and from whose face towards the child there shone a
sweetness so angelical, that it seemed to form a sort of glory round
both. I protest I could have knelt before her too, and adored in her
the Divine beneficence in endowing us with the maternal storge, which
began with our race and sanctifies the history of mankind.

So it was with this, in a word, that Mrs. Pendennis comforted herself
on the death of her husband, whom, however, she always reverenced as
the best, the most upright, wise, high-minded, accomplished, and awful
of men. If the women did not make idols of us, and if they saw us as we
see each other, would life be bearable, or could society go on? Let a
man pray that none of his womankind should form a just estimation of
him. If your wife knew you as you are, neighbour, she would not grieve
much about being your widow, and would let your grave-lamp go out very
soon, or perhaps not even take the trouble to light it. Whereas Helen
Pendennis put up the handsomest of memorials to her husband, and
constantly renewed it with the most precious oil.

As for Arthur Pendennis, after that awful shock which the sight of his
dead father must have produced on him, and the pity and feeling which
such an event no doubt occasioned, I am not sure that in the very
moment of the grief, and as he embraced his mother and tenderly
consoled her, and promised to love her for ever, there was not
springing up in his breast a feeling of secret triumph and exultation.
He was the chief now and lord. He was Pendennis; and all round about
him were his servants and handmaids. “You’ll never send me away,”
little Laura said, tripping by him, and holding his hand. “You won’t
send me to school, will you, Arthur?”

Arthur kissed her and patted her head. No, she shouldn’t go to school.
As for going himself, that was quite out of the question. He had
determined that that part of his life should not be renewed. In the
midst of the general grief, and the corpse still lying above, he had
leisure to conclude that he would have it all holidays for the future,
that he wouldn’t get up till he liked, or stand the bullying of the
Doctor any more, and had made a hundred of such day-dreams and resolves
for the future. How one’s thoughts will travel! and how quickly our
wishes beget them! When he with Laura in his hand went into the kitchen
on his way to the dog-kennel, the fowl-houses, and other his favourite
haunts, all the servants there assembled in great silence with their
friends, and the labouring men and their wives, and Sally Potter who
went with the post-bag to Clavering, and the baker’s man from
Clavering—all there assembled and drinking beer on the melancholy
occasion—rose up on his entrance and bowed or curtseyed to him. They
never used to do so last holidays, he felt at once and with
indescribable pleasure. The cook cried out, “O Lord,” and whispered,
“How Master Arthur do grow!” Thomas, the groom, in the act of drinking,
put down the jug alarmed before his master. Thomas’s master felt the
honour keenly. He went through and looked at the pointers. As Flora put
her nose up to his waistcoat, and Ponto, yelling with pleasure, hurtled
at his chain, Pen patronised the dogs, and said, “Poo Ponto, poo
Flora,” in his most condescending manner. And then he went and looked
at Laura’s hens, and at the pigs, and at the orchard, and at the dairy;
perhaps he blushed to think that it was only last holidays he had in a
manner robbed the great apple-tree, and been scolded by the dairymaid
for taking cream.

They buried John Pendennis, Esquire, “formerly an eminent medical
practitioner at Bath, and subsequently an able magistrate, a benevolent
landlord, and a benefactor to many charities and public institutions in
this neighbourhood and county,” with one of the most handsome funerals
that had been seen since Sir Roger Clavering was buried here, the clerk
said, in the abbey church of Clavering St. Mary’s. A fair marble slab,
from which the above inscription is copied, was erected over the
Fairoaks’ pew in the church. On it you may see the Pendennis coat of
arms, and crest, an eagle looking towards the sun, with the motto ‘nec
tenui penna,’ to the present day. Doctor Portman alluded to the
deceased most handsomely and affectingly, as “our dear departed
friend,” in his sermon next Sunday; and Arthur Pendennis reigned in his
stead.




CHAPTER III.
In which Pendennis appears as a very young Man indeed


Arthur was about sixteen years old, we have said, when he began to
reign; in person (for I see that the artist who is to illustrate this
book, and who makes sad work of the likeness, will never be able to
take my friend off) he had what his friends would call a dumpy, but his
mamma styled a neat little figure. His hair was of a healthy brown
colour, which looks like gold in the sunshine, his face was round,
rosy, freckled, and good-humoured, his whiskers (when those facial
ornaments for which he sighed so ardently were awarded to him by
nature) were decidedly of a reddish hue; in fact, without being a
beauty, he had such a frank, good-natured kind face, and laughed so
merrily at you out of his honest blue eyes, that no wonder Mrs.
Pendennis thought him the pride of the whole county. Between the ages
of sixteen and eighteen he rose from five feet six to five feet eight
inches in height, at which altitude he paused. But his mother wondered
at it. He was three inches taller than his father. Was it possible that
any man could grow to be three inches taller than Mr. Pendennis?

You may be certain he never went back to school; the discipline of the
establishment did not suit him, and he liked being at home much better.
The question of his return was debated, and his uncle was for his going
back. The Doctor wrote his opinion that it was most important for
Arthur’s success in after-life that he should know a Greek play
thoroughly, but Pen adroitly managed to hint to his mother what a
dangerous place Greyfriars was, and what sad wild fellows some of the
chaps there were, and the timid soul, taking alarm at once, acceded to
his desire to stay at home.

Then Pen’s uncle offered to use his influence with His Royal Highness
the Commander-in-Chief, who was pleased to be very kind to him, and
proposed to get Pen a commission in the Foot Guards. Pen’s heart leaped
at this: he had been to hear the band at St. James’s play on a Sunday,
when he went out to his uncle. He had seen Tom Ricketts, of the fourth
form, who used to wear a jacket and trousers so ludicrously tight, that
the elder boys could not forbear using him in the quality of a butt or
‘cockshy’—he had seen this very Ricketts arrayed in crimson and gold,
with an immense bear-skin cap on his head, staggering under the colours
of the regiment. Tom had recognised him and gave him a patronising nod.
Tom, a little wretch whom he had cut over the back with a hockey-stick
last quarter—and there he was in the centre of the square, rallying
round the flag of his country, surrounded by bayonets, crossbelts, and
scarlet, the band blowing trumpets and banging cymbals—talking
familiarly to immense warriors with tufts to their chins and Waterloo
medals. What would not Pen have given to wear such epaulettes and enter
such a service?

But Helen Pendennis, when this point was proposed to her by her son,
put on a face full of terror and alarm. She said she “did not quarrel
with others who thought differently, but that in her opinion a
Christian had no right to make the army a profession. Mr. Pendennis
never, never would have permitted his son to be a soldier. Finally, she
should be very unhappy if he thought of it.” Now Pen would have as soon
cut off his nose and ears as deliberately, and of aforethought malice,
made his mother unhappy; and, as he was of such a generous disposition
that he would give away anything to any one, he instantly made a
present of his visionary red coat and epaulettes and his ardour for
military glory to his mother.

She thought him the noblest creature in the world. But Major Pendennis,
when the offer of the commission was acknowledged and refused, wrote
back a curt and somewhat angry letter to the widow, and thought his
nephew was rather a spooney.

He was contented, however, when he saw the boy’s performances out
hunting at Christmas, when the Major came down as usual to Fairoaks.
Pen had a very good mare, and rode her with uncommon pluck and grace.
He took his fences with great coolness, and yet with judgment, and
without bravado. He wrote to the chaps at school about his top-boots,
and his feats across country. He began to think seriously of a scarlet
coat: and his mother must own that she thought it would become him
remarkably well; though, of course, she passed hours of anguish during
his absence, and daily expected to see him brought home on a shutter.

With these amusements, in rather too great plenty, it must not be
assumed that Pen neglected his studies altogether. He had a natural
taste for reading every possible kind of book which did not fall into
his school-course. It was only when they forced his head into the
waters of knowledge, that he refused to drink. He devoured all the
books at home from Inchbald’s Theatre to White’s Farriery; he ransacked
the neighbouring book-cases. He found at Clavering an old cargo of
French novels, which he read with all his might; and he would sit for
hours perched upon the topmost bar of Doctor Portman’s library steps
with a folio on his knees, whether it were Hakluyt’s Travels, Hobbes’s
Leviathan, Augustini Opera, or Chaucer’s Poems. He and the Vicar were
very good friends, and from his Reverence, Pen learned that honest
taste for port wine which distinguished him through life. And as for
that dear good woman, Mrs. Portman, who was not in the least jealous,
though her Doctor avowed himself in love with Mrs. Pendennis, whom he
pronounced to be by far the finest lady in the county—all her grief
was, as she looked up fondly at Pen perched on the book-ladder, that
her daughter, Minny, was too old for him—as indeed she was—Miss Myra
Portman being at that period only two years younger than Pen’s mother,
and weighing as much as Pen and Mrs. Pendennis together.

Are these details insipid? Look back, good friend, at your own youth,
and ask how was that? I like to think of a well-nurtured boy, brave and
gentle, warm-hearted and loving, and looking the world in the face with
kind honest eyes. What bright colours it wore then, and how you enjoyed
it! A man has not many years of such time. He does not know them whilst
they are with him. It is only when they are passed long away that he
remembers how dear and happy they were.

In order to keep Mr. Pen from indulging in that idleness of which his
friend the Doctor of the Cistercians had prophesied such awful
consequences, Mr. Smirke, Dr. Portman’s curate, was engaged at a
liberal salary, to walk or ride over from Clavering and pass several
hours daily with the young gentleman. Smirke was a man perfectly
faultless at a tea-table, wore a curl on his fair forehead, and tied
his neck-cloth with a melancholy grace. He was a decent scholar and
mathematician, and taught Pen as much as the lad was ever disposed to
learn, which was not much. For Pen had soon taken the measure of his
tutor, who, when he came riding into the court-yard at Fairoaks on his
pony, turned out his toes so absurdly, and left such a gap between his
knees and the saddle, that it was impossible for any lad endowed with a
sense of humour to respect such an equestrian. He nearly killed Smirke
with terror by putting him on his mare, and taking him a ride over a
common, where the county fox-hounds (then hunted by that staunch old
sportsman, Mr. Hardhead, of Dumplingbeare) happened to meet. Mr.
Smirke, on Pen’s mare, Rebecca (she was named after Pen’s favourite
heroine, the daughter of Isaac of York), astounded the hounds as much
as he disgusted the huntsman, laming one of the former by persisting in
riding amongst the pack, and receiving a speech from the latter, more
remarkable for energy of language, than any oration he had ever heard
since he left the bargemen on the banks of Isis.

Smirke confided to his pupil his poems both Latin and English; and
presented to Mrs. Pendennis a volume of the latter, printed at Clapham,
his native place. The two read the ancient poets together, and rattled
through them at a pleasant rate, very different from that steady
grubbing pace with which the Cistercians used to go over the classic
ground, scenting out each word as they went, and digging up every root
in the way. Pen never liked to halt, but made his tutor construe when
he was at fault, and thus galloped through the Iliad and the Odyssey,
the tragic playwriters, writers, and the charming wicked Aristophanes
(whom he vowed to be the greatest poet of all). But he went at such a
pace that, though he certainly galloped through a considerable extent
of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after-life, and had only
such a vague remembrance of his early classic course as a man has in
the House of Commons, let us say, who still keeps up two or three
quotations; or a reviewer who, just for decency’s sake, hints at a
little Greek. Our people are the most prosaic in the world, but the
most faithful; and with curious reverence we keep up and transmit, from
generation to generation, the superstition of what we call the
education of a gentleman.

Besides the ancient poets, you may be sure Pen read the English with
great gusto. Smirke sighed and shook his head sadly both about Byron
and Moore. But Pen was a sworn fire-worshipper and a Corsair; he had
them by heart, and used to take little Laura into the window and say,
“Zuleika, I am not thy brother,” in tones so tragic that they caused
the solemn little maid to open her great eyes still wider. She sat,
until the proper hour for retirement, sewing at Mrs. Pendennis’s knee,
and listening to Pen reading out to her of nights without comprehending
one word of what he read.

He read Shakspeare to his mother (which she said she liked, but
didn’t), and Byron, and Pope, and his favourite Lalla Rookh, which
pleased her indifferently. But as for Bishop Heber, and Mrs. Hemans
above all, this lady used to melt right away, and be absorbed into her
pocket-handkerchief, when Pen read those authors to her in his kind
boyish voice. The ‘Christian Year’ was a book which appeared about that
time. The son and the mother whispered it to each other with awe—faint,
very faint, and seldom in after-life Pendennis heard that solemn
church-music: but he always loved the remembrance of it, and of the
times when it struck on his heart, and he walked over the fields full
of hope and void of doubt, as the church-bells rang on Sunday morning.

It was at this period of his existence, that Pen broke out in the
Poets’ Corner of the County Chronicle, with some verses with which he
was perfectly well satisfied. His are the verses signed ‘NEP.,’
addressed ‘To a Tear;’ ‘On the Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo;’
‘To Madame Caradori singing at the Assize Meetings;’ ‘On Saint
Bartholomew’s Day’ (a tremendous denunciation of Popery, and a solemn
warning to the people of England to rally against emancipating the
Roman Catholics), etc., etc.—all which masterpieces, Mrs. Pendennis no
doubt keeps to this day, along with his first socks, the first cutting
of his hair, his bottle, and other interesting relics of his infancy.
He used to gallop Rebecca over the neighbouring Dumpling Downs, or into
the county town, which, if you please, we shall call Chatteris,
spouting his own poems, and filled with quite a Byronic afflatus as he
thought.

His genius at this time was of a decidedly gloomy cast. He brought his
mother a tragedy, in which, though he killed sixteen people before the
second act, it made her laugh so, that he thrust the masterpiece into
the fire in a pet. He projected an epic poem in blank verse, ‘Cortez,
or the Conqueror of Mexico, and the Inca’s Daughter.’ He wrote part of
‘Seneca, or the Fatal Bath,’ and ‘Ariadne in Naxos;’ classical pieces,
with choruses and strophes and antistrophes, which sadly puzzled poor
Mrs. Pendennis; and began a ‘History of the Jesuits,’ in which he
lashed that Order with tremendous severity, and warned his Protestant
fellow-countrymen of their machinations. His loyalty did his mother’s
heart good to witness. He was a staunch, unflinching Church-and-King
man in those days; and at the election, when Sir Giles Beanfield stood
on the Blue interest, against Lord Trehawk, Lord Eyrie’s son, a Whig
and a friend of Popery, Arthur Pendennis, with an immense bow for
himself, which his mother made, and with a blue ribbon for Rebecca,
rode alongside of the Reverend Doctor Portman, on his grey mare Dowdy,
and at the head of the Clavering voters, whom the Doctor brought up to
plump for the Protestant Champion.

On that day Pen made his first speech at the Blue Hotel: and also, it
appears, for the first time in his life—took a little more wine than
was good for him. Mercy! what a scene it was at Fairoaks, when he rode
back at ever so much o’clock at night. What moving about of lanterns in
the court-yard and stables, though the moon was shining out; what a
gathering of servants, as Pen came home, clattering over the bridge and
up the stableyard, with half a score of the Clavering voters yelling
after him the Blue song of the election.

He wanted them all to come in and have some wine—some very good
Madeira—some capital Madeira—John, go and get some Madeira,—and there
is no knowing what the farmers would have done, had not Madam Pendennis
made her appearance in a white wrapper, with a candle—and scared those
zealous Blues so by the sight of her pale handsome face, that they
touched their hats and rode off.

Besides these amusements and occupations in which Mr. Pen indulged,
there was one which forms the main business and pleasure of youth, if
the poets tell us aright, whom Pen was always studying; and this young
fellow’s heart was so ardent, and his imagination so eager, that it is
not to be expected he should long escape the passion to which we
allude, and which, ladies, you have rightly guessed to be that of Love.
Pen sighed for it first in secret, and, like the love-sick swain in
Ovid, opened his breast and said, “Aura, veni.” What generous youth is
there that has not courted some such windy mistress in his time?

Yes, Pen began to feel the necessity of a first love—of a consuming
passion—of an object on which he could concentrate all those vague
floating fancies under which he sweetly suffered—of a young lady to
whom he could really make verses, and whom he could set up and adore,
in place of those unsubstantial Ianthes and Zuleikas to whom he
addressed the outpourings of his gushing muse. He read his favourite
poems over and over again, he called upon Alma Venus the delight of
gods and men, he translated Anacreon’s odes, and picked out passages
suitable to his complaint from Waller, Dryden, Prior, and the like.
Smirke and he were never weary, in their interviews, of discoursing
about love. The faithless tutor entertained him with sentimental
conversations in place of lectures on algebra and Greek; for Smirke was
in love too. Who could help it, being in daily intercourse with such a
woman? Smirke was madly in love (as far as such a mild flame as Mr.
Smirke’s may be called madness) with Mrs. Pendennis. That honest lady,
sitting down below stairs teaching little Laura to play the piano, or
devising flannel petticoats for the poor round about her, or otherwise
busied with the calm routine of her modest and spotless Christian life,
was little aware what storms were brewing in two bosoms upstairs in the
study—in Pen’s, as he sate in his shooting jacket, with his elbows on
the green study-table, and his hands clutching his curly brown hair,
Homer under his nose,—and in worthy Mr. Smirke’s, with whom he was
reading. Here they would talk about Helen and Andromache. “Andromache’s
like my mother,” Pen used to avouch; “but I say, Smirke, by Jove I’d
cut off my nose to see Helen;” and he would spout certain favourite
lines which the reader will find in their proper place in the third
book. He drew portraits of her—they are extant still—with straight
noses and enormous eyes, and ‘Arthur Pendennis delineavit et pinxit’
gallantly written underneath.

As for Mr. Smirke he naturally preferred Andromache. And in consequence
he was uncommonly kind to Pen. He gave him his Elzevir Horace, of which
the boy was fond, and his little Greek Testament which his own mamma at
Clapham had purchased and presented to him. He bought him a silver
pencil-case; and in the matter of learning let him do just as much or
as little as ever he pleased. He always seemed to be on the point of
unbosoming himself to Pen: nay, he confessed to the latter that he had
a—an attachment, an ardently cherished attachment, about which
Pendennis longed to hear, and said, “Tell us, old chap, is she
handsome? has she got blue eyes or black?” But Doctor Portman’s curate,
heaving a gentle sigh, cast up his eyes to the ceiling, and begged Pen
faintly to change the conversation. Poor Smirke! He invited Pen to dine
at his lodgings over Madame Fribsby’s, the milliner’s, in Clavering;
and once when it was raining, and Mrs. Pendennis, who had driven in her
pony-chaise into Clavering with respect to some arrangements, about
leaving off mourning probably, was prevailed upon to enter the curate’s
apartments, he sent out for pound-cakes instantly. The sofa on which
she sate became sacred to him from that day: and he kept flowers in the
glass which she drank from ever after.

As Mrs. Pendennis was never tired of hearing the praises of her son, we
may be certain that this rogue of a tutor neglected no opportunity of
conversing with her upon that subject. It might be a little tedious to
him to hear the stories about Pen’s generosity, about his bravery in
fighting the big naughty boy, about his fun and jokes, about his
prodigious skill in Latin, music, riding, etc., but what price would he
not pay to be in her company? and the widow, after these conversations,
thought Mr. Smirke a very pleasing and well-informed man. As for her
son, she had not settled in her mind whether he was to be Senior
Wrangler and Archbishop of Canterbury, or Double First Class at Oxford,
and Lord Chancellor. That all England did not possess his peer, was a
fact about which there was, in her mind, no manner of question.

A simple person, of inexpensive habits, she began forthwith to save,
and, perhaps, to be a little parsimonious, in favour of her boy. There
were no entertainments, of course, at Fairoaks, during the year of her
weeds. Nor, indeed, did the Doctor’s silver dish-covers, of which he
was so proud, and which were flourished all over with the arms of the
Pendennises, and surmounted with their crest, come out of the
plate-chests again for long, long years. The household was diminished,
and its expenses curtailed. There was a very blank anchorite repast
when Pen dined from home: and he himself headed the remonstrance from
the kitchen regarding the deteriorated quality of the Fairoaks beer.
She was becoming miserly for Pen. Indeed, who ever accused women of
being just? They are always sacrificing themselves or somebody for
somebody else’s sake.

There happened to be no young woman in the small circle of friends who
were in the widow’s intimacy whom Pendennis could by any possibility
gratify by endowing her with the inestimable treasure of a heart which
he was longing to give away. Some young fellows in this predicament
bestow their young affections upon Dolly, the dairymaid, or cast the
eyes of tenderness upon Molly, the blacksmith’s daughter. Pen thought a
Pendennis much too grand a personage to stoop so low. He was too
high-minded for a vulgar intrigue, and, at the idea of an intrigue or a
seduction, had he ever entertained it, his heart would have revolted as
from the notion of any act of baseness or dishonour. Miss Minny Portman
was too old, too large, and too fond of reading ‘Rollin’s Ancient
History.’ The Miss Boardbacks, Admiral Boardback’s daughters (of St.
Vincent’s, or Fourth of June House, as it was called), disgusted Pen
with the London airs which they brought into the country, from
Gloucester Place, where they passed the season, and looked down upon
Pen as a chit. Captain Glanders’s (H.P., 50th Dragoon Guards) three
girls were in brown-holland pinafores as yet, with the ends of their
hair-plaits tied up in dirty pink ribbon. Not having acquired the art
of dancing, the youth avoided such chances as he might have had of
meeting with the fair sex at the Chatteris’ Assemblies; in fine, he was
not in love, because there was nobody at hand to fall in love with. And
the young monkey used to ride out, day after day, in quest, of
Dulcinea; and peep into the pony-chaises and gentlefolks’ carriages, as
they drove along the broad turnpike roads, with a heart beating within
him, and a secret tremor and hope that she might be in that yellow
postchaise coming swinging up the hill, or one of those three girls in
beaver bonnets in the back seat of the double gig, which the fat old
gentleman in black was driving, at four miles an hour. The postchaise
contained a snuffy old dowager of seventy, with a maid, her
contemporary. The three girls in the beaver bonnets were no handsomer
than the turnips that skirted the roadside. Do as he might, and ride
where he would, the fairy princess that he was to rescue and win, had
not yet appeared to honest Pen.

Upon these points he did not discourse to his mother. He had a world of
his own. What generous, ardent, imaginative soul has not a secret
pleasure-place in which it disports? Let no clumsy prying or dull
meddling of ours try to disturb it in our children. Actaeon was a brute
for wanting to push in where Diana was bathing. Leave him occasionally
alone, my good madam, if you have a poet for a child. Even your
admirable advice may be a bore sometimes. You are faultless; but it
does not follow that everybody in your family is to think exactly like
yourself. Yonder little child may have thoughts too deep even for your
great mind, and fancies so coy and timid that they will not bare
themselves when your ladyship sits by.

Helen Pendennis by the force of sheer love divined a great number of
her son’s secrets. But she kept these things in her heart (if we may so
speak), and did not speak of them. Besides, she had made up her mind
that he was to marry little Laura, who would be eighteen when Pen was
six-and-twenty: and had finished his college career, and had made his
grand tour, and was settled either in London, astonishing all the
metropolis by his learning and eloquence at the bar, or better still in
a sweet country parsonage surrounded with hollyhocks and roses, close
to a delightful romantic ivy-covered church, from the pulpit of which
Pen would utter the most beautiful sermons ever preached.

While these natural sentiments were waging war and trouble in honest
Pen’s bosom, it chanced one day that he rode into Chatteris, for the
purpose of carrying to the County Chronicle a tremendous and thrilling
poem for the next week’s paper; and putting up his horse according to
custom, at the stables of the George Hotel there, he fell in with an
old acquaintance. A grand black tandem, with scarlet wheels, came
rattling into the inn yard, as Pen stood there in converse with the
hostler about Rebecca; and the voice of the driver called out, “Hallo,
Pendennis, is that you?” in a loud patronising manner. Pen had some
difficulty in recognising under the broad-brimmed hat and the vast
great-coats and neckcloths, with which the new-comer was habited, the
person and figure of his quondam schoolfellow, Mr. Foker.

A year’s absence had made no small difference in that gentleman. A
youth who had been deservedly whipped a few months previously, and who
spent his pocket-money on tarts and hardbake, now appeared before Pen
in one of those costumes to which the public consent, that I take to be
quite as influential in this respect as ‘Johnson’s Dictionary,’ has
awarded the title of “Swell.’ He had a bull-dog between his legs, and
in his scarlet shawl neckcloth was a pin representing another bull-dog
in gold: he wore a fur waistcoat laced over with gold chains; a green
cutaway coat with basket-buttons, and a white upper-coat ornamented
with cheese-plate buttons, on each of which was engraved some stirring
incident of the road or the chase; all which ornaments set off this
young fellow’s figure to such advantage, that you would hesitate to say
which character in life he most resembled, and whether he was a boxer
en goguette, or a coachman in his gala suit.

“Left that place for good, Pendennis?” Mr. Foker said, descending from
his landau and giving Pendennis a finger.

“Yes, this year—or more,” Pen said.

“Beastly old hole,” Mr. Foker remarked. “Hate it. Hate the Doctor: hate
Towzer, the second master; hate everybody there. Not a fit place for a
gentleman.”

“Not at all,” said Pen, with an air of the utmost consequence.

“By gad, sir, I sometimes dream, now, that the Doctor’s walking into
me,” Foker continued (and Pen smiled as he thought that he himself had
likewise fearful dreams of this nature). “When I think of the diet
there, by gad, sir, I wonder how I stood it. Mangy mutton, brutal beef;
pudding on Thursdays and Sundays, and that fit to poison you. Just look
at my leader—did you ever see a prettier animal? Drove over from
Baymouth. Came the nine mile in two-and-forty minutes. Not bad going,
sir.”

“Are you stopping at Baymouth, Foker?” Pendennis asked.

“I’m coaching there,” said the other, with a nod.

“What?” asked Pen, and in a tone of such wonder, that Foker burst out
laughing, and said, “He was blowed if he didn’t think Pen was such a
flat as not to know what coaching meant.”

“I’m come down with a coach from Oxford. A tutor, don’t you see, old
boy? He’s coaching me, and some other men, for the little go. Me and
Spavin have the drag between us. And I thought I’d just tool over and
go to the play. Did you ever see Rowkins do the hornpipe?” and Mr.
Foker began to perform some steps of that popular dance in the inn
yard, looking round for the sympathy of his groom and the stable-men.

Pen thought he would like to go to the play too: and could ride home
afterwards, as there was a moonlight. So he accepted Foker’s invitation
to dinner, and the young men entered the inn together, where Mr. Foker
stopped at the bar, and called upon Miss Rincer, the landlady’s fair
daughter, who presided there, to give him a glass of ‘his mixture.’

Pen and his family had been known at the George ever since they came
into the country; and Mr. Pendennis’s carriages and horses always put
up there when he paid a visit to the county town. The landlady dropped
the heir of Fairoaks a very respectful curtsey, and complimented him
upon his growth and manly appearance, and asked news of the family at
Fairoaks, and of Doctor Portman and the Clavering people, to all of
which questions the young gentleman answered with much affability. But
he spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Rincer with that sort of good nature with
which a young Prince addresses his father’s subjects; never dreaming
that those bonnes gens were his equals in life.

Mr. Foker’s behaviour was quite different. He inquired for Rincer and
the cold in his nose, told Mrs. Rincer a riddle, asked Miss Rincer when
she would be ready to marry him, and paid his compliments to Miss
Brett, the other young lady in the bar, all in a minute of time, and
with a liveliness and facetiousness which set all these ladies in a
giggle; and he gave a cluck, expressive of great satisfaction, as he
tossed off his mixture which Miss Rincer prepared and handed to him.

“Have a drop,” said he to Pen, “it’s recommended to me by the faculty
as a what-do-you-call-’em—a stomatic, old boy. Give the young one a
glass, R., and score it up to yours truly.”

Poor Pen took a glass, and everybody laughed at the face which he made
as he put it down—gin, bitters, and some other cordial was the compound
with which Mr. Foker was so delighted as to call it by the name of
Foker’s own. As Pen choked, sputtered, and made faces, the other took
occasion to remark to Mr. Rincer that the young fellow was green, very
green, but that he would soon form him; and then they proceeded to
order dinner—which Mr. Foker determined should consist of turtle and
venison; cautioning the landlady to be very particular about icing the
wine.

Then Messrs. Foker and Pen strolled down the High Street together—the
former having a cigar in his mouth, which he had drawn out of a case
almost as big as a portmanteau. He went in to replenish it at Mr.
Lewis’s, and talked to that gentleman for a while, sitting down on the
counter: he then looked in at the fruiterer’s, to see the pretty girl
there, to whom he paid compliments similar to those before addressed to
the bar at the George; then they passed the County Chronicle office,
for which Pen had his packet ready, in the shape of ‘Lines to Thyrza,’
but poor Pen did not like to put the letter into the editor’s box while
walking in company with such a fine gentleman as Mr. Foker. They met
heavy dragoons of the regiment always quartered at Chatteris; and
stopped and talked about the Baymouth balls, and what a pretty girl was
Miss Brown, and what a dem fine woman Mrs. Jones was. It was in vain
that Pen recalled to his own mind what a stupid ass Foker used to be at
school—how he could scarcely read, how he was not cleanly in his
person, and notorious for his blunders and dulness. Mr. Foker was no
more like a gentleman now than in his school days: and yet Pen felt a
secret pride in strutting down High Street with a young fellow who
owned tandems, talked to officers, and ordered turtle and champagne for
dinner. He listened, and with respect too, to Mr. Foker’s accounts of
what the men did at the University of which Mr. F. was an ornament, and
encountered a long series of stories about boat-racing, bumping,
College grass-plats, and milk-punch—and began to wish to go up himself
to College to a place where there were such manly pleasures and
enjoyments. Farmer Gurnett, who lives close by Fairoaks, riding by at
this minute and touching his hat to Pen, the latter stopped him, and
sent a message to his mother to say that he had met with an old
schoolfellow, and should dine in Chatteris.

The two young gentlemen continued their walk, and were passing round
the Cathedral Yard, where they could hear the music of the afternoon
service (a music which always exceedingly impressed and affected Pen),
but whither Mr. Foker came for the purpose of inspecting the
nursery-maids who frequent the Elms Walk there, and who are uncommonly
pretty at Chatteris, and here they strolled until with a final burst of
music the small congregation was played out.

Old Doctor Portman was one of the few who came from the venerable gate.
Spying Pen, he came and shook him by the hand, and eyed with wonder
Pen’s friend, from whose mouth and cigar clouds of fragrance issued,
which curled round the Doctor’s honest face and shovel hat.

“An old schoolfellow of mine, Mr. Foker,” said Pen. The Doctor said
“H’m”: and scowled at the cigar. He did not mind a pipe in his study,
but the cigar was an abomination to the worthy gentleman.

“I came up on Bishop’s business,” the Doctor said. “We’ll ride home,
Arthur, if you like?”

“I—I’m engaged to my friend here,” Pen answered.

“You had better come home with me,” said the Doctor.

“His mother knows he’s out, sir,” Mr. Foker remarked; “don’t she,
Pendennis?”

“But that does not prove that he had not better come home with me,” the
Doctor growled, and he walked off with great dignity.

“Old boy don’t like the weed, I suppose,” Foker said. “Ha! who’s
here?—here’s the General, and Bingley, the manager. How do, Cos? How
do, Bingley?”

“How does my worthy and gallant young Foker?” said the gentleman
addressed as the General; and who wore a shabby military cape with a
mangy collar, and a hat cocked very much over one eye.

“Trust you are very well, my very dear sir,” said the other gentleman,
“and that the Theatre Royal will have the honour of your patronage
to-night. We perform ‘The Stranger,’ in which your humble servant
will—-”

“Can’t stand you in tights and Hessians, Bingley,” young Mr. Foker
said. On which the General, with the Irish accent, said, “But I think
ye’ll like Miss Fotheringay, in Mrs. Haller, or me name’s not Jack
Costigan.”

Pen looked at these individuals with the greatest interest. He had
never seen an actor before; and he saw Dr. Portman’s red face looking
over the Doctor’s shoulder, as he retreated from the Cathedral Yard,
evidently quite dissatisfied with the acquaintances into whose hands
Pen had fallen.

Perhaps it would have been much better for him had he taken the
parson’s advice and company home. But which of us knows his fate?




CHAPTER IV.
Mrs. Haller


Having returned to the George, Mr. Foker and his guest sate down to a
handsome repast in the coffee-room; where Mr. Rincer brought in the
first dish, and bowed as gravely as if he was waiting upon the
Lord-Lieutenant of the county. Mr. Foker attacked the turtle and
venison with as much gusto as he had shown the year before, when he
used to make feasts off ginger-beer and smuggled polonies. Pen could
not but respect his connoisseurship as he pronounced the champagne to
be condemned gooseberry, and winked at the port with one eye. The
latter he declared to be of the right sort; and told the waiters there
was no way of humbugging him. All these attendants he knew by their
Christian names, and showed a great interest in their families; and as
the London coaches drove up, which in those early days used to set off
from the George, Mr. Foker flung the coffee-room window open, and
called the guards and coachmen by their Christian names, too, asking
about their respective families, and imitating with great liveliness
and accuracy the tooting of the horns as Jem the ostler whipped the
horses’ cloths off, and the carriages drove gaily away.

“A bottle of sherry, a bottle of sham, a bottle of port and a shass
caffy, it ain’t so bad, hay, Pen?” Foker said, and pronounced, after
all these delicacies and a quantity of nuts and fruit had been
dispatched, that it was time to “toddle.” Pen sprang up with very
bright eyes, and a flushed face; and they moved off towards the
theatre, where they paid their money to the wheezy old lady slumbering
in the money-taker’s box. “Mrs. Dropsicum, Bingley’s mother-in-law,
great in Lady Macbeth,” Foker said to his companion. Foker knew her,
too.

They had almost their choice of places in the boxes of the theatre,
which was no better filled than country theatres usually are in spite
of the “universal burst of attraction and galvanic thrills of delight”
advertised by Bingley in the play-bills. A score or so of people dotted
the pit-benches, a few more kept a kicking and whistling in the
galleries, and a dozen others, who came in with free admissions, were
in the boxes where our young gentlemen sate. Lieutenants Rodgers and
Podgers, and young Cornet Tidmus, of the Dragoons, occupied a private
box. The performers acted to them, and these gentlemen seemed to hold
conversations with the players when not engaged in the dialogue, and
applauded them by name loudly.

Bingley the manager, who assumed all the chief tragic and comic parts
except when he modestly retreated to make way for the London stars, who
came down occasionally to Chatteris, was great in the character of the
‘Stranger.’ He was attired in the tight pantaloons and Hessian boots
which the stage legend has given to that injured man, with a large
cloak and beaver and a hearse feather in it drooping over his raddled
old face, and only partially concealing his great buckled brown wig. He
had the stage jewellery on too, of which he selected the largest and
most shiny rings for himself, and allowed his little finger to quiver
out of his cloak with a sham diamond ring covering the first joint of
the finger and twiddling in the faces of the pit. Bingley made it a
favour to the young men of his company to go on in light comedy parts
with that ring. They flattered him by asking its history. The stage has
its traditional jewels as the Crown and all great families have. This
had belonged to George Frederick Cooke, who had had it from Mr. Quin,
who may have bought it for a shilling. Bingley fancied the world was
fascinated with its glitter.

He was reading out of the stage-book—that wonderful stage-book which is
not bound like any other book in the world, but is rouged and tawdry
like the hero or heroine who holds it; and who holds it as people never
do hold books: and points with his finger to a passage, and wags his
head ominously at the audience, and then lifts up eyes and finger to
the ceiling professing to derive some intense consolation from the work
between which and heaven there is a strong affinity. Anybody who has
ever seen one of our great light comedians, X., in a chintz
dressing-gown, such as nobody ever wore, and representing himself to
the public as a young nobleman in his apartments, and whiling away the
time with light literature until his friend Sir Harry shall arrive, or
his father shall come down to breakfast—anybody, I say, who has seen
the great X. over a sham book has indeed had a great pleasure and an
abiding matter for thought.

Directly the Stranger saw the young men, he acted at them; eyeing them
solemnly over his gilt volume as he lay on the stage-bank showing his
hand, his ring, and his Hessians. He calculated the effect that every
one of these ornaments would produce upon his victims: he was
determined to fascinate them, for he knew they had paid their money;
and he saw their families coming in from the country and filling the
cane chairs in his boxes.

As he lay on the bank reading, his servant, Francis, made remarks upon
his master.

“Again reading,” said Francis, “thus it is, from morn to night. To him
nature has no beauty—life no charm. For three years I have never seen
him smile” (the gloom of Bingley’s face was fearful to witness during
these comments of the faithful domestic). “Nothing diverts him. O, if
he would but attach himself to any living thing, were it an animal—for
something man must love.”

[Enter Tobias (Goll) from the hut.] He cries, “O, how refreshing, after
seven long weeks, to feel these warm sunbeams once again. Thanks,
bounteous heaven, for the joy I taste!” He presses his cap between his
hands, looks up and prays. The Stranger eyes him attentively.

Francis to the Stranger. “This old man’s share of earthly happiness can
be but little. Yet mark how grateful he is for his portion of it.”

Bingley. “Because though old, he is but a child in the leading-string
of hope.” (He looks steadily at Foker, who, however, continues to suck
the top of his stick in an unconcerned manner.)

Francis. “Hope is the nurse of life.”

Bingley. “And her cradle—is the grave.”

The Stranger uttered this with the moan of a bassoon in agony, and
fixed his eyes on Pendennis so steadily, that the poor lad was quite
put out of countenance. He thought the whole house must be looking at
him; and cast his eyes down. As soon as ever he raised them Bingley’s
were at him again. All through the scene the manager played at him.
When he was about to do a good action, and sent off Francis with his
book, so that that domestic should not witness the deed of benevolence
which he meditated, Bingley marked the page carefully, so that he might
continue the perusal of the volume off the stage if he liked. But all
was done in the direct face of Pendennis, whom the manager was bent
upon subjugating. How relieved the lad was when the scene ended, and
Foker, tapping with his cane, cried out “Bravo, Bingley!”

“Give him a hand, Pendennis; you know every chap likes a hand,” Mr.
Foker said; and the good-natured young gentleman, and Pendennis
laughing, and the dragoons in the opposite box, began clapping hands to
the best of their power.

A chamber in Wintersen Castle closed over Tobias’s hut and the Stranger
and his boots; and servants appeared bustling about with chairs and
tables—“That’s Hicks and Miss Thackthwaite,” whispered Foker. “Pretty
girl, ain’t she, Pendennis? But stop—hurray—bravo! here’s the
Fotheringay.”

The pit thrilled and thumped its umbrellas; a volley of applause was
fired from the gallery: the Dragoon officers and Foker clapped their
hands furiously: you would have thought the house was full, so loud
were their plaudits. The red face and ragged whiskers of Mr. Costigan
were seen peering from the side-scene. Pen’s eyes opened wide and
bright as Mrs. Haller entered with a downcast look, then rallying at
the sound of the applause, swept the house with a grateful glance, and,
folding her hands across her breast, sank down in a magnificent
curtsey. More applause, more umbrellas; Pen this time, flaming with
wine and enthusiasm, clapped hands and sang “bravo” louder than all.
Mrs. Haller saw him, and everybody else, and old Mr. Bows, the little
first fiddler of the orchestra (which was this night increased by a
detachment of the band of the Dragoons, by the kind permission of
Colonel Swallowtail), looked up from the desk where he was perched,
with his crutch beside him, and smiled at the enthusiasm of the lad.

Those who have only seen Miss Fotheringay in later days, since her
marriage and introduction into London life, have little idea how
beautiful a creature she was at the time when our friend Pen first set
eyes on her: and I warn my reader, as beforehand, that the pencil which
illustrates this work (and can draw an ugly face tolerably well, but is
sadly put out when it tries to delineate a beauty) can give no sort of
notion of her. She was of the tallest of women, and at her then age of
six-and-twenty—for six-and-twenty she was, though she vows she was only
nineteen—in the prime and fulness of her beauty. Her forehead was vast,
and her black hair waved over it with a natural ripple (that beauties
of late days have tried to imitate with the help of the
crimping-irons), and was confined in shining and voluminous braids at
the back of a neck such as you see on the shoulders of the Louvre
Venus—that delight of gods and men. Her eyes, when she lifted them up
to gaze on you, and ere she dropped their purple deep-fringed lids,
shone with tenderness and mystery unfathomable. Love and Genius seemed
to look out from them and then retire coyly, as if ashamed to have been
seen at the lattice. Who could have had such a commanding brow but a
woman of high intellect? She never laughed (indeed her teeth were not
good), but a smile of endless tenderness and sweetness played round her
beautiful lips, and in the dimples of her cheeks and her lovely chin.
Her nose defied description in those days. Her ears were like two
little pearl shells, which the earrings she wore (though the handsomest
properties in the theatre) only insulted. She was dressed in long
flowing robes of black, which she managed and swept to and fro with
wonderful grace, and out of the folds of which you only saw her sandals
occasionally; they were of rather a large size; but Pen thought them as
ravishing as the slippers of Cinderella. But it was her hand and arm
that this magnificent creature most excelled in, and somehow you could
never see her but through them. They surrounded her. When she folded
them over her bosom in resignation; when she dropped them in mute
agony, or raised them in superb command; when in sportive gaiety her
hands fluttered and waved before her, like what shall we say?—like the
snowy doves before the chariot of Venus—it was with these arms and
hands that she beckoned, repelled, entreated, embraced, her admirers—no
single one, for she was armed with her own virtue, and with her
father’s valour, whose sword would have leapt from its scabbard at any
insult offered to his child—but the whole house; which rose to her, as
the phrase was, as she curtseyed and bowed, and charmed it.

Thus she stood for a minute—complete and beautiful—as Pen stared at
her. “I say, Pen, isn’t she a stunner?” asked Mr. Foker.

“Hush!” Pen said, “she’s speaking.”

She began her business in a deep sweet voice. Those who know the play
of the ‘Stranger,’ are aware that the remarks made by the various
characters are not valuable in themselves, either for their sound
sense, their novelty of observation, or their poetic fancy. In fact, if
a man were to say it was a stupid play, he would not be far wrong.
Nobody ever talked so. If we meet idiots in life, as will happen, it is
a great mercy that they do not use such absurdly fine words. The
Stranger’s talk is sham, like the book he reads and the hair he wears,
and the bank he sits on, and the diamond ring he makes play with—but,
in the midst of the balderdash, there runs that reality of love,
children, and forgiveness of wrong, which will be listened to wherever
it is preached, and sets all the world sympathising.

With what smothered sorrow, with what gushing pathos, Mrs. Haller
delivered her part! At first, when as Count Wintersen’s housekeeper,
and preparing for his Excellency’s arrival, she has to give orders
about the beds and furniture, and the dinner, etc., to be got ready,
she did so with the calm agony of despair. But when she could get rid
of the stupid servants and give vent to her feelings to the pit and the
house, she overflowed to each individual as if he were her particular
confidant, and she was crying out her griefs on his shoulder: the
little fiddler in the orchestra (whom she did not seem to watch, though
he followed her ceaselessly) twitched, twisted, nodded, pointed about,
and when she came to the favourite passage, “I have a William too, if
he be still alive—Ah, yes, if he be still alive. His little sisters,
too! Why, Fancy, dost thou rack me so? Why dost thou image my poor
children fainting in sickness, and crying to—to—their mum—um—other,”
when she came to this passage little Bows buried his face in his blue
cotton handkerchief, after crying out “Bravo.”

All the house was affected. Foker, for his part, taking out a large
yellow bandanna, wept piteously. As for Pen, he was gone too far for
that. He followed the woman about and about—when she was off the stage,
it and the house were blank; the lights and the red officers, reeled
wildly before his sight. He watched her at the side-scene—where she
stood waiting to come on the stage, and where her father took off her
shawl: when the reconciliation arrived, and she flung herself down on
Mr. Bingley’s shoulders, whilst the children clung to their knees, and
the Countess (Mrs. Bingley) and Baron Steinforth (performed with great
liveliness and spirit by Garbetts)—while the rest of the characters
formed a group round them, Pen’s hot eyes only saw Fotheringay,
Fotheringay. The curtain fell upon him like a pall. He did not hear a
word of what Bingley said, who came forward to announce the play for
the next evening, and who took the tumultuous applause, as usual, for
himself. Pen was not even distinctly aware that the house was calling
for Miss Fotheringay, nor did the manager seem to comprehend that
anybody else but himself had caused the success of the play. At last he
understood it—stepped back with a grin, and presently appeared with
Mrs. Haller on his arm. How beautiful she looked! Her hair had fallen
down, the officers threw her flowers. She clutched them to her heart.
She put back her hair, and smiled all round. Her eyes met Pen’s. Down
went the curtain again: and she was gone. Not one note could he hear of
the overture which the brass band of the dragoons blew by kind
permission of Colonel Swallowtail.

“She is a crusher, ain’t she now!” Mr. Foker asked of his companion.

Pen did not know exactly what Foker said, and answered vaguely. He
could not tell the other what he felt; he could not have spoken, just
then, to any mortal. Besides, Pendennis did not quite know what he felt
yet; it was something overwhelming, maddening, delicious; a fever of
wild joy and undefined longing.

And now Rowkins and Miss Thackthwaite came on to dance the favourite
double hornpipe, and Foker abandoned himself to the delights of this
ballet, just as he had to the tears of the tragedy, a few minutes
before. Pen did not care for it, or indeed think about the dance,
except to remember that that woman was acting with her in the scene
where she first came in. It was a mist before his eyes. At the end of
the dance he looked at his watch and said it was time for him to go.

“Hang it, stay to see The Bravo of the Battle-Axe,” Foker said,
“Bingley’s splendid in it; he wears red tights, and has to carry Mrs.
B. over the Pine-bridge of the Cataract, only she’s too heavy. It’s
great fun, do stop.”

Pen looked at the bill with one lingering fond hope that Miss
Fotheringay’s name might be hidden, somewhere, in the list of the
actors of the after-piece, but there was no such name. Go he must. He
had a long ride home. He squeezed Foker’s hand. He was choking to
speak, but he couldn’t. He quitted the theatre and walked frantically
about the town, he knew not how long; then he mounted at the George and
rode homewards, and Clavering clock sang out one as he came into the
yard at Fairoaks. The lady of the house might have been awake, but she
only heard him from the passage outside his room as he dashed into bed
and pulled the clothes over his head.

Pen had not been in the habit of passing wakeful nights, so he at once
fell off into a sound sleep. Even in later days and with a great deal
of care and other thoughtful matter to keep him awake, a man from long
practice or fatigue or resolution begins by going to sleep as usual:
and gets a nap in advance of Anxiety. But she soon comes up with him
and jogs his shoulder, and says, “Come, my man, no more of this
laziness, you must wake up and have a talk with me.” Then they fall to
together in the midnight. Well, whatever might afterwards happen to
him, poor little Pen was not come to this state yet; he tumbled into a
sound sleep—did not wake until an early hour in the morning, when the
rooks began to caw from the little wood beyond his bedroom windows;
and—at that very instant and as his eyes started open, the beloved
image was in his mind. “My dear boy,” he heard her say, “you were in a
sound sleep and I would not disturb you: but I have been close by your
pillow all this while: and I don’t intend that you shall leave me. I am
Love! I bring with me fever and passion: wild longing, maddening
desire; restless craving and seeking. Many a long day ere this I heard
you calling out for me; and behold now I am come.”

Was Pen frightened at the summons? Not he. He did not know what was
coming: it was all wild pleasure and delight as yet. And as, when three
years previously, and on entering the fifth form at the Cistercians,
his father had made him a present of a gold watch which the boy took
from under his pillow and examined on the instant of waking: for ever
rubbing and polishing it up in private and retiring into corners to
listen to its ticking: so the young man exulted over his new delight;
felt in his waistcoat pocket to see that it was safe; wound it up at
nights, and at the very first moment of waking hugged it and looked at
it.—By the way, that first watch of Pen’s was a showy ill-manufactured
piece: it never went well from the beginning, and was always getting
out of order. And after putting it aside into a drawer and forgetting
it for some time, he swapped it finally away for a more useful
time-keeper.

Pen felt himself to be ever so many years older since yesterday. There
was no mistake about it now. He was as much in love as the best hero in
the best romance he ever read. He told John to bring his shaving water
with the utmost confidence. He dressed himself in some of his finest
clothes that morning: and came splendidly down to breakfast,
patronising his mother and little Laura, who had been strumming her
music lesson for hours before; and who after he had read the prayers
(of which he did not heed one single syllable) wondered at his grand
appearance, and asked him to tell her what the play was about?

Pen laughed and declined to tell Laura what the play was about. In fact
it was quite as well that she should not know. Then she asked him why
he had got on his fine pin and beautiful new waistcoat?

Pen blushed and told his mother that the old schoolfellow with whom he
had dined at Chatteris was reading with a tutor at Baymouth, a very
learned man; and as he was himself to go to College, and as there were
several young men pursuing their studies at Baymouth—he was anxious to
ride over—and—and just see what the course of their reading was.

Laura made a long face. Helen Pendennis looked hard at her son,
troubled more than ever with the vague doubt and terror which had been
haunting her ever since the last night, when Farmer Gurnett brought
back the news that Pen would not return home to dinner. Arthur’s eyes
defied her. She tried to console herself, and drive off her fears. The
boy had never told her an untruth. Pen conducted himself during
breakfast in a very haughty and supercilious manner; and, taking leave
of the elder and younger lady, was presently heard riding out of the
stablecourt. He went gently at first, but galloped like a madman as
soon as he thought that he was out of hearing.

Smirke, thinking of his own affairs, and softly riding with his toes
out, to give Pen his three hours’ reading at Fairoaks, met his pupil,
who shot by him like the wind. Smirke’s pony shied, as the other
thundered past him; the gentle curate went over his head among the
stinging-nettles in the hedge. Pen laughed as they met, pointed towards
the Baymouth road, and was gone half a mile in that direction before
poor Smirke had picked himself up.

Pen had resolved in his mind that he must see Foker that morning; he
must hear about her; know about her; be with somebody who knew her; and
honest Smirke, for his part, sitting up among the stinging-nettles, as
his pony cropped quietly in the hedge, thought dismally to himself,
ought he to go to Fairoaks now that his pupil was evidently gone away
for the day. Yes, he thought he might go, too. He might go and ask Mrs.
Pendennis when Arthur would be back; and hear Miss Laura her Watts’s
Catechism. He got up on the little pony—both were used to his slipping
off—and advanced upon the house from which his scholar had just rushed
away in a whirlwind.

Thus love makes fools of all of us, big and little; and the curate had
tumbled over head and heels in pursuit of it, and Pen had started in
the first heat of the mad race.




CHAPTER V.
Mrs. Haller at Home


Without slackening her pace, Rebecca the mare galloped on to Baymouth,
where Pen put her up at the inn stables, and ran straightway to Mr.
Foker’s lodgings, which he knew from the direction given to him by that
gentleman on the previous day. On reaching these apartments, which were
over a chemist’s shop whose stock of cigars and sodawater went off
rapidly by the kind patronage of his young inmates, Pen only found Mr.
Spavin, Foker’s friend, and part owner of the tandem which the latter
had driven into Chatteris, who was smoking, and teaching a little dog,
a friend of his, tricks with a bit of biscuit.

Pen’s healthy red face, fresh from the gallop, compared oddly with the
waxy debauched little features of Foker’s chum; the latter remarked it.
“Who’s that man?” he thought, “he looks as fresh as a bean. His hand
don’t shake of a morning, I’d bet five to one.”

Foker had not come home at all. Here was a disappointment!—Mr. Spavin
could not say when his friend would return. Sometimes he stopped a day,
sometimes a week. Of what college was Pen? Would he have anything?
There was a very fair tap of ale. Mr. Spavin was enabled to know
Pendennis’s name, on the card which the latter took out and laid down
(perhaps Pen in these days was rather proud of having a card)—and so
the young men took leave.

Then Pen went down the rock, and walked about on the sand, biting his
nails by the shore of the much-sounding sea. It stretched before him
bright and immeasurable. The blue waters came rolling into the bay,
foaming and roaring hoarsely: Pen looked them in the face with blank
eyes, hardly regarding them. What a tide there was pouring into the
lad’s own mind at the time, and what a little power had he to check it!
Pen flung stones into the sea, but it still kept coming on. He was in a
rage at not seeing Foker. He wanted to see Foker. He must see Foker.
“Suppose I go on—on the Chatteris road, just to see if I can meet him,”
Pen thought. Rebecca was saddled in another half hour, and galloping on
the grass by the Chatteris road. About four miles from Baymouth, the
Clavering road branches off, as everybody knows, and the mare naturally
was for taking that turn, but, cutting her over the shoulder, Pen
passed the turning, and rode on to the turnpike without seeing any sign
of the black tandem and red wheels.

As he was at the turnpike he might as well go on: that was quite clear.
So Pen rode to the George, and the hostler told him that Mr. Foker was
there sure enough, and that “he’d been a makin a tremendous row the
night afore, a drinkin and a singin, and wanting to fight Tom the
postboy: which I’m thinking he’d have had the worst of it,” the man
added, with a grin. “Have you carried up your master’s ’ot water to
shave with?” he added, in a very satirical manner, to Mr. Foker’s
domestic, who here came down the yard bearing his master’s clothes,
most beautifully brushed and arranged. “Show Mr. Pendennis up to ’un,”
and Pen followed the man at last to the apartment, where, in the midst
of an immense bed, Mr. Harry Foker lay reposing.

The feather bed and bolsters swelled up all round Mr. Foker, so that
you could hardly see his little sallow face and red silk nightcap.

“Hullo!” said Pen.

“Who goes there? brother, quickly tell!” sang out the voice from the
bed. “What! Pendennis again? Is your Mamma acquainted with your
absence? Did you sup with us last night? No stop—who supped with us
last night, Stoopid?”

“There was the three officers, sir, and Mr. Bingley, sir, and Mr.
Costigan, sir,” the man answered, who received all Mr. Foker’s remarks
with perfect gravity.

“Ah yes: the cup and merry jest went round. We chanted and I remember I
wanted to fight a postboy. Did I thrash him, Stoopid?”

“No, sir. Fight didn’t come off, sir,” said Stoopid, still with perfect
gravity. He was arranging Mr. Foker’s dressing-case—a trunk, the gift
of a fond mother, without which the young fellow never travelled. It
contained a prodigious apparatus in plate; a silver dish, a silver mug,
silver boxes and bottles for all sorts of essences, and a choice of
razors ready against the time when Mr. Foker’s beard should come.

“Do it some other day,” said the young fellow, yawning and throwing up
his little lean arms over his head. “No, there was no fight; but there
was chanting. Bingley chanted, I chanted, the General chanted—Costigan
I mean.—Did you ever hear him sing ‘The Little Pig under the Bed,’
Pen?”

“The man we met yesterday,” said Pen, all in a tremor, “the father
of—-”

“Of the Fotheringay,—the very man. Ain’t she a Venus, Pen?”

“Please sir, Mr. Costigan’s in the sittin-room, sir, and says, sir, you
asked him to breakfast, sir. Called five times, sir; but wouldn’t wake
you on no account; and has been here since eleven o’clock, sir—-”

“How much is it now?”

“One, sir.”

“What would the best of mothers say,” cried the little sluggard, “if
she saw me in bed at this hour? She sent me down here with a grinder.
She wants me to cultivate my neglected genus—He, be! I say, Pen, this
isn’t quite like seven o’clock school,—is it, old boy?”—and the young
fellow burst out into a boyish laugh of enjoyment. Then he added—“Go in
and talk to the General whilst I dress. And I say, Pendennis, ask him
to sing you ‘The Little Pig under the Bed;’ it’s capital.” Pen went off
in great perturbation, to meet Mr. Costigan, and Mr. Foker commenced
his toilet.

Of Mr. Foker’s two grandfathers, the one from whom he inherited a
fortune was a brewer; the other was an earl, who endowed him with the
most doting mother in the world. The Fokers had been at the Cistercian
school from father to son; at which place, our friend, whose name could
be seen over the playground wall, on a public-house sign, under which
‘Foker’s Entire’ was painted, had been dreadfully bullied on account of
his trade, his uncomely countenance, his inaptitude for learning and
cleanliness, his gluttony and other weak points. But those who know how
a susceptible youth, under the tyranny of his schoolfellows, becomes
silent and a sneak, may understand how in a very few months after his
liberation from bondage, he developed himself as he had done; and
became the humorous, the sarcastic, the brilliant Foker, with whom we
have made acquaintance. A dunce he always was, it is true; for learning
cannot be acquired by leaving school and entering at college as a
fellow-commoner; but he was now (in his own peculiar manner) as great a
dandy as he before had been a slattern, and when he entered his
sitting-room to join his two guests, arrived scented and arrayed in
fine linen, and perfectly splendid in appearance.

General or Captain Costigan—for the latter was the rank which he
preferred to assume—was seated in the window with the newspaper held
before him at arm’s length. The Captain’s eyes were somewhat dim; and
he was spelling the paper, with the help of his lips, as well as of
those bloodshot eyes of his, as you see gentlemen do to whom reading is
a rare and difficult occupation. His hat was cocked very much on one
ear; and as one of his feet lay up in the window-seat, the observer of
such matters might remark, by the size and shabbiness of the boots
which the Captain wore, that times did not go very well with him.
Poverty seems as if it were disposed, before it takes possession of a
man entirely, to attack his extremities first: the coverings of his
head, feet, and hands are its first prey. All these parts of the
Captain’s person were particularly rakish and shabby. As soon as he saw
Pen he descended from the window-seat and saluted the new-comer, first
in a military manner, by conveying a couple of his fingers (covered
with a broken black glove) to his hat, and then removing that ornament
altogether. The Captain was inclined to be bald, but he brought a
quantity of lank iron-grey hair over his pate, and had a couple of
whisps of the same falling down on each side of his face. Much whisky
had spoiled what complexion Mr. Costigan may have possessed in his
youth. His once handsome face had now a copper tinge. He wore a very
high stock, scarred and stained in many places; and a dress-coat
tightly buttoned up in those parts where the buttons had not parted
company from the garment.

“The young gentleman to whom I had the honour to be introjuiced
yesterday in the Cathadral Yard,” said the Captain, with a splendid bow
and wave of his hat. “I hope I see you well, sir. I marked ye in the
thayatre last night during me daughter’s perfawrumance; and missed ye
on my return. I did but conduct her home, sir, for Jack Costigan,
though poor, is a gentleman; and when I reintered the house to pay me
respects to me joyous young friend, Mr. Foker—ye were gone. We had a
jolly night of ut, sir—Mr. Foker, the three gallant young dragoons, and
your ’umble servant. Gad, sir, it put me in mind of one of our old
nights when I bore His Majesty’s commission in the Foighting Hundtherd
and Third.” And he pulled out an old snuff box, which he presented with
a stately air to his new acquaintance.

Arthur was a great deal too much flurried to speak. This shabby-looking
buck was—was her father. The Captain was perfumed with the
recollections of the last night’s cigars, and pulled and twisted the
tuft on his chin as jauntily as any young dandy.

“I hope, Miss F—, Miss Costigan is well, sir,” Pen said, flushing up.
“She—she gave me greater pleasure, than—than I—I—I ever enjoyed at a
play. I think, sir—I think she’s the finest actress in the world,” he
gasped out.

“Your hand, young man! for ye speak from your heart,” cried the
Captain. “Thank ye, sir, an old soldier and a fond father thanks ye.
She is the finest actress in the world. I’ve seen the Siddons, sir, and
the O’Nale—they were great, but what were they compared to Miss
Fotheringay? I do not wish she should ashume her own name while on the
stage. Me family, sir, are proud people; and the Costigans of
Costiganstown think that an honest man, who has borne Her Majesty’s
colours in the Hundred and Third, would demean himself, by permitting
his daughter to earn her old father’s bread.”

“There cannot be a more honourable duty, surely,” Pen said.

“Honourable! Bedad, sir, I’d like to see the man who said Jack Costigan
would consent to anything dishonourable. I have a heart, sir, though I
am poor; I like a man who has a heart. You have: I read it in your
honest face and steady eye. And would you believe it”? he added, after
a pause, and with a pathetic whisper, “that that Bingley who has made
his fortune by me child, gives her but two guineas a week: out of which
she finds herself in dresses, and which, added to me own small means,
makes our all?”

Now the Captain’s means were so small as to be, it may be said, quite
invisible. But nobody knows how the wind is tempered to shorn Irish
lambs, and in what marvellous places they find pasture. If Captain
Costigan, whom I had the honour to know, would but have told his
history, it would have been a great moral story. But he neither would
have told it if he could, nor could if he would; for the Captain was
not only unaccustomed to tell the truth,—he was unable even to think
it—and fact and fiction reeled together in his muzzy, whiskified brain.

He began life rather brilliantly with a pair of colours, a fine person
and legs, and one of the most beautiful voices in the world. To his
latest day he sang with admirable pathos and humour those wonderful
Irish ballads which are so mirthful and so melancholy: and was always
the first himself to cry at their pathos. Poor Cos! he was at once
brave and maudlin, humorous and an idiot; always good-natured, and
sometimes almost trustworthy. Up to the last day of his life he would
drink with any man, and back any man’s bill: and his end was in a
spunging-house, where the sheriff’s officer, who took him, was fond of
him.

In his brief morning of life, Cos formed the delight of regimental
messes, and had the honour of singing his songs, bacchanalian and
sentimental, at the tables of the most illustrious generals and
commanders-in-chief, in the course of which period he drank three times
as much claret as was good for him, and spent his doubtful patrimony.
What became of him subsequently to his retirement from the army, is no
affair of ours. I take it, no foreigner understands the life of an
Irish gentleman without money, the way in which he manages to keep
afloat—the wind-raising conspiracies, in which he engages with heroes
as unfortunate as himself—the means by which he contrives, during most
days of the week, to get his portion of whisky-and-water: all these are
mysteries to us inconceivable: but suffice it to say, that through all
the storms of life Jack had floated somehow, and the lamp of his nose
had never gone out.

Before he and Pen had had a half-hour’s conversation, the Captain
managed to extract a couple of sovereigns from the young gentleman for
tickets for his daughter’s benefit, which was to take place speedily;
and was not a bona fide transaction such as that of the last year, when
poor Miss Fotheringay had lost fifteen shillings by her venture; but
was an arrangement with the manager, by which the lady was to have the
sale of a certain number of tickets, keeping for herself a large
portion of the sum for which they were sold.

Pen had but two pounds in his purse, and he handed them over to the
Captain for the tickets; he would have been afraid to offer more lest
he should offend the latter’s delicacy. Costigan scrawled him an order
for a box, lightly slipped the sovereigns into his waistcoat, and
slapped his hand over the place where they lay. They seemed to warm his
old sides.

“Faith, sir,” said he, “the bullion’s scarcer with me than it used to
be, as is the case with many a good fellow. I won six hundthred of ’em
in a single night, sir, when me kind friend, His Royal Highness the
Duke of Kent, was in Gibralther.” And he straightway poured out to Pen
a series of stories regarding the claret drunk, the bets made, the
races ridden by the garrison there, with which he kept the young
gentleman amused until the arrival of their host and his breakfast.

Then it was good to see the Captain’s behaviour before the devilled
turkey and the mutton chops! His stories poured forth unceasingly, and
his spirits rose as he chatted to the young men. When he got a bit of
sunshine, the old lazzarone basked in it; he prated about his own
affairs and past splendour, and all the lords, generals, and
Lord-Lieutenants he had ever known. He described the death of his
darling Bessie, the late Mrs. Costigan, and the challenge he had sent
to Captain Shanty Clancy, of the Slashers, for looking rude at Miss
Fotheringay as she was on her kyar in the Phaynix; and then he
described how the Captain apologised, gave a dinner at the Kildare
Street, where six of them drank twinty-one bottles of claret, etc. He
announced that to sit with two such noble and generous young fellows
was the happiness and pride of an old soldier’s existence; and having
had a second glass of Curacoa, was so happy that he began to cry.
Altogether we should say that the Captain was not a man of much
strength of mind, or a very eligible companion for youth; but there are
worse men, holding much better places in life, and more dishonest, who
have never committed half so many rogueries as he. They walked out, the
Captain holding an arm of each of his dear young friends, and in a
maudlin state of contentment. He winked at one or two tradesmen’s shops
where, possibly, he owed a bill, as much as to say, “See the company
I’m in—sure I’ll pay you, my boy,”—and they parted finally with Mr.
Foker at a billiard-room, where the latter had a particular engagement
with some gentlemen of Colonel Swallowtail’s regiment.

Pen and the shabby Captain still walked the street together; the
Captain, in his sly way, making inquiries about Mr. Foker’s fortune and
station in life. Pen told him how Foker’s father was a celebrated
brewer, and his mother was Lady Agnes Milton, Lord Rosherville’s
daughter. The Captain broke out into a strain of exaggerated compliment
and panegyric about Mr. Foker, whose “native aristocracie,” he said,
“could be seen with the twinkling of an oi—and only served to adawrun
other qualities which he possessed, a foin intellect and a generous
heart,”—in not one word of which speech did the Captain accurately
believe.

Pen walked on, listening to his companion’s prate, wondering, amused,
and puzzled. It had not as yet entered into the boy’s head to
disbelieve any statement that was made to him; and being of a candid
nature himself, he took naturally for truth what other people told him.
Costigan had never had a better listener, and was highly flattered by
the attentiveness and modest bearing of the young man.

So much pleased was he with the young gentleman, so artless, honest,
and cheerful did Pen seem to be, that the Captain finally made him an
invitation, which he very seldom accorded to young men, and asked Pen
if he would do him the fever to enter his humble abode, which was near
at hand, where the Captain would have the honour of inthrojuicing his
young friend to his daughther, Miss Fotheringay?

Pen was so delightfully shocked at this invitation, and was so stricken
down by the happiness thus suddenly offered to him, that he thought he
should have dropped from the Captain’s arm at first, and trembled lest
the other should discover his emotion. He gasped out a few incoherent
words, indicative of the high gratification he should have in being
presented to the lady for whose—for whose talents he had conceived such
an admiration—such an extreme admiration; and followed the Captain,
scarcely knowing whither that gentleman led him. He was going to see
her! He was going to see her! In her was the centre of the universe.
She was the kernel of the world for Pen. Yesterday, before he knew her,
seemed a period ever so long ago—a revolution was between him and that
time, and a new world about to begin.

The Captain conducted his young friend to that quiet little street in
Chatteris, which is called Prior’s Lane, which lies in the
ecclesiastical quarter of the town, close by Dean’s Green and the
canons’ houses, and is overlooked by the enormous towers of the
cathedral; there the Captain dwelt modestly in the first floor of a low
gabled house, on the door of which was the brass plate of ‘Creed,
Tailor and Robe-maker.’ Creed was dead, however. His widow was a
pew-opener in the cathedral hard by; his eldest son was a little scamp
of a choir-boy, who played toss-halfpenny, led his little brothers into
mischief, and had a voice as sweet as an angel. A couple of the latter
were sitting on the door-step, down which you went into the passage of
the house; and they jumped up with great alacrity to meet their lodger,
and plunged wildly, and rather to Pen’s surprise, at the swallow-tails
of the Captain’s dress-coat; for the truth is, that the good-natured
gentleman, when he was in cash, generally brought home an apple or a
piece of gingerbread for these children. “Whereby the widdy never
pressed me for rint when not convanient,” as he remarked afterwards to
Pen, winking knowingly, and laying a finger on his nose.

Pen tumbled down the step, and as he followed his companion up the
creaking old stair, his knees trembled under him. He could hardly see
when he entered, following the Captain, and stood in the room—in her
room. He saw something black before him, and waving as if making a
curtsey, and heard, but quite indistinctly, Costigan making a speech
over him, in which the Captain, with his usual magniloquence, expressed
to “me child” his wish to make her known to “his dear and admirable
young friend, Mr. Awther Pindinnis, a young gentleman of property in
the neighbourhood, a person of refoined moind, and enviable manners, a
sincare lover of poethry, and a man possest of a feeling and
affectionate heart.”

“It is very fine weather,” Miss Fotheringay said, in an Irish accent,
and with a deep rich melancholy voice.

“Very,” said Mr. Pendennis. In this romantic way their conversation
began; and he found himself seated on a chair, and having leisure to
look at the young lady.

She looked still handsomer off the stage, than before the lamps. All
her attitudes were naturally grand and majestical. If she went and
stood up against the mantelpiece her robe draped itself classically
round her; her chin supported itself on her hand, the other lines of
her form arranged themselves in full harmonious undulations—she looked
like a Muse in contemplation. If she sate down on a cane-bottomed
chair, her arm rounded itself over the back of the seat, her hand
seemed as if it ought to have a sceptre put into it, the folds of her
dress fell naturally round her in order, like ladies of honour round a
throne, and she looked like an empress. All her movements were graceful
and imperial. In the morning you could see her hair was blue-black, her
complexion of dazzling fairness, with the faintest possible blush
flickering, as it were, in her cheek. Her eyes were grey, with
prodigious long lashes; and as for her mouth, Mr. Pendennis has given
me subsequently to understand, that it was of a staring red colour,
with which the most brilliant geranium, sealing-wax, or Guardsman’s
coat, could not vie.

“And very warm,” continued this empress and Queen of Sheba.

Mr. Pen again assented, and the conversation rolled on in this manner.
She asked Costigan whether he had had a pleasant evening at the George,
and he recounted the supper and the tumblers of punch. Then the father
asked her how she had been employing the morning.

“Bows came,” said she, “at ten, and we studied Ophalia. It’s for the
twenty-fourth, when I hope, sir, we shall have the honour of seeing
ye.”

“Indeed, indeed, you will,” Mr. Pendennis cried; wondering that she
should say ‘Ophalia,’ and speak with an Irish inflection of voice
naturally, who had not the least Hibernian accent on the stage.

“I’ve secured ’um for your benefit, dear,” said the Captain, tapping
his waistcoat pocket, wherein lay Pen’s sovereigns, and winking at Pen,
with one eye, at which the boy blushed.

“Mr—-the gentleman’s very obleging,” said Mrs. Haller.

“My name is Pendennis,” said Pen, blushing. “I—I—hope you’ll—you’ll
remember it.” His heart thumped so as he made this audacious
declaration, that he almost choked in uttering it.

“Pendennis”—she answered slowly, and looking him full in the eyes, with
a glance, so straight, so clear, so bright, so killing, with a voice so
sweet, so round, so low, that the word and the glance shot Pen through
and through, and perfectly transfixed him with pleasure.

“I never knew the name was so pretty before,” Pen said.

“’Tis a very pretty name,” Ophelia said. “Pentweazle’s not a pretty
name. Remember, papa, when we were on the Norwich Circuit, Young
Pentweazle, who used to play second old men, and married Miss Rancy,
the Columbine; they’re both engaged in London now, at the Queen’s, and
get five pounds a week. Pentweazle wasn’t his real name. ’Twas Judkin
gave it him, I don’t know why. His name was Harrington; that is, his
real name was Potts; fawther a clergyman, very respectable. Harrington
was in London, and got in debt. Ye remember; he came out in Falkland,
to Mrs. Bunce’s Julia.”

“And a pretty Julia she was,” the Captain interposed; “a woman of
fifty, and a mother of ten children. ’Tis you ought to have been Julia,
or my name’s not Jack Costigan.”

“I didn’t take the leading business then,” Miss Fotheringay said
modestly; “I wasn’t fit for’t till Bows taught me.”

“True for you, my dear,” said the Captain: and bending to Pendennis, he
added, “Rejuiced in circumstances, sir, I was for some time a
fencing-master in Dublin (there’s only three men in the empire could
touch me with the foil once, but Jack Costigan’s getting old and stiff
now, sir), and my daughter had an engagement at the thayater there; and
’twas there that my friend, Mr. Bows, who saw her capabilities, and is
an uncommon ’cute man, gave her lessons in the dramatic art, and made
her what ye see. What have ye done since Bows went, Emily?”

“Sure, I’ve made a pie,” Emily said, with perfect simplicity. She
pronounced it “Poy.”

“If ye’ll try it at four o’clock, sir, say the word,” said Costigan
gallantly. “That girl, sir, makes the best veal and ham pie in England,
and I think I can promise ye a glass of punch of the right flavour.”

Pen had promised to be at home to dinner at six o’clock, but the rascal
thought he could accommodate pleasure and duty in this point, and was
only too eager to accept this invitation. He looked on with delight and
wonder whilst Ophelia busied herself about the room, and prepared for
the dinner. She arranged the glasses, and laid and smoothed the little
cloth, all which duties she performed with a quiet grace and good
humour, which enchanted her guest more and more. The “poy” arrived from
the baker’s in the hands of one of the little choir-boy’s brothers at
the proper hour: and at four o’clock Pen found himself at
dinner—actually at dinner with the greatest tragic actress in the
world, and her father—with the handsomest woman in all creation—with
his first and only love, whom he had adored ever since when?—ever since
yesterday, ever since for ever. He ate a crust of her making, he poured
her out a glass of beer, he saw her drink a glass of punch—just one
wine-glass full—out of the tumbler which she mixed for her papa. She
was perfectly good-natured, and offered to mix one for Pendennis too.
It was prodigiously strong; Pen had never in his life drunk so much
spirits and water. Was it the punch, or the punch-maker who intoxicated
him?

During dinner, when the Captain, whom his daughter treated most
respectfully, ceased prattling about himself and his adventures, Pen
tried to engage the Fotheringay in conversation about poetry and about
her profession. He asked her what she thought of Ophelia’s madness, and
whether she was in love with Hamlet or not? “In love with such a little
ojous wretch as that stunted manager of a Bingley?” She bristled with
indignation at the thought. Pen explained it was not of her he spoke,
but of Ophelia of the play. “Oh, indeed; if no offence was meant, none
was taken: but as for Bingley, indeed, she did not value him—not that
glass of punch.” Pen next tried her on Kotzebue. “Kotzebue? who was
he?”—“The author of the play in which she had been performing so
admirably.” “She did not know that—the man’s name at the beginning of
the book was Thompson,” she said. Pen laughed at her adorable
simplicity. He told her of the melancholy fate of the author of the
play, and how Sand had killed him. It was for the first time in her
life that Miss Costigan had ever heard of Mr. Kotzebue’s existence, but
she looked as if she was very much interested, and her sympathy
sufficed for honest Pen.

And in the midst of this simple conversation, the hour and a quarter
which poor Pen could afford to allow himself, passed away only too
quickly; and he had taken leave, he was gone, and away on his rapid
road homewards on the back of Rebecca. She was called upon to show her
mettle in the three journeys which she made that day.

“What was that he was talking about, the madness of Hamlet, and the
theory of the great German critic on the subject?” Emily asked of her
father.

“’Deed then I don’t know, Milly dear,” answered the Captain. “We’ll ask
Bows when he comes.”

“Anyhow, he’s a nice, fair-spoken pretty young man,” the lady said:
“how many tickets did he take of you?”

“Faith, then, he took six, and gev me two guineas, Milly,” the Captain
said. “I suppose them young chaps is not too flush of coin.”

“He’s full of book-learning,” Miss Fotheringay continued. “Kotzebue!
He, he, what a droll name indeed, now; and the poor fellow killed by
Sand, too! Did ye ever hear such a thing? I’ll ask Bows about it, papa,
dear.”

“A queer death, sure enough,” ejaculated the Captain, and changed the
painful theme. “’Tis an elegant mare the young gentleman rides,”
Costigan went on to say; “and a grand breakfast, intirely, that young
Mister Foker gave us.”

“He’s good for two private boxes, and at leest twenty tickets, I should
say,” cried the daughter, a prudent lass, who always kept her fine eyes
on the main chance.

“I’ll go bail of that,” answered the papa, and so their conversation
continued awhile, until the tumbler of punch was finished; and their
hour of departure soon came, too; for at half-past six Miss Fotheringay
was to appear at the theatre again, whither her father always
accompanied her; and stood, as we have seen, in the side-scene watching
her, and drank spirits-and-water in the green-room with the company
there.

“How beautiful she is,” thought Pen, cantering homewards. “How simple
and how tender! How charming it is to see a woman of her commanding
genius busying herself with the delightful, though humble, offices of
domestic life, cooking dishes to make her old father comfortable, and
brewing drink for him with her delicate fingers! How rude it was of me
to begin to talk about professional matters, and how well she turned
the conversation! By the way, she talked about professional matters
herself; but then with what fun and humour she told the story of her
comrade, Pentweazle, as he was called! There is no humour like Irish
humour. Her father is rather tedious, but thoroughly amiable; and how
fine of him, giving lessons in fencing after he quitted the army, where
he was the pet of the Duke of Kent! Fencing! I should like to continue
my fencing, or I shall forget what Angelo taught me. Uncle Arthur
always liked me to fence—he says it is the exercise of a gentleman.
Hang it. I’ll take some lessons of Captain Costigan. Go along,
Rebecca—up the hill, old lady. Pendennis, Pendennis—how she spoke the
word! Emily, Emily! how good, how noble, how beautiful, how perfect,
she is!”

Now the reader, who has had the benefit of overhearing the entire
conversation which Pen had with Miss Fotheringay, can judge for himself
about the powers of her mind, and may perhaps be disposed to think that
she has not said anything astonishingly humorous or intellectual in the
course of the above interview. She has married, and taken her position
in the world as the most spotless and irreproachable lady since, and I
have had the pleasure of making her acquaintance: and must certainly
own, against my friend Pen’s opinion, that his adored Emily is not a
clever woman. The truth is, she had not only never heard of Kotzebue,
but she had never heard of Farquhar, or Congreve, or any dramatist in
whose plays she had not a part: and of these dramas she only knew the
part which concerned herself. A wag once told her that Dante was born
at Algiers: and asked her,—which Dr. Johnson wrote first, ‘Irene,’ or
‘Every Man in his Humour.’ But she had the best of the joke, for she
had never heard of Irene or Every Man in his Humour, or Dante, or
perhaps Algiers. It was all one to her. She acted what little Bows told
her—where he told her to sob, she sobbed—where he told her to laugh,
she laughed. She gave the tirade or the repartee without the slightest
notion of its meaning. She went to church and goes every Sunday, with a
reputation perfectly intact, and was (and is) as guiltless of sense as
of any other crime.

But what did our Pen know of these things? He saw a pair of bright
eyes, and he believed in them—a beautiful image, and he fell down and
worshipped it. He supplied the meaning which her words wanted; and
created the divinity which he loved. Was Titania the first who fell in
love with an ass, or Pygmalion the only artist who has gone crazy about
a stone? He had found her; he had found what his soul thirsted after.
He flung himself into the stream and drank with all his might. Let
those say who have been thirsty once how delicious that first draught
is. As he rode down the avenue towards home—Pen shrieked with laughter
as he saw the Reverend Mr. Smirke once more coming demurely away from
Fairoaks on his pony. Smirke had dawdled and stayed at the cottages on
the way, and then dawdled with Laura over her lessons—and then looked
at Mrs. Pendennis’s gardens and improvements until he had perfectly
bored out that lady: and he had taken his leave at the very last minute
without that invitation to dinner which he fondly expected.

Pen was full of kindness and triumph. “What, picked up and sound?” he
cried out laughing. “Come along back, old fellow, and eat my dinner—I
have had mine: but we will have a bottle of the old wine and drink her
health, Smirke.”

Poor Smirke turned the pony’s head round, and jogged along with Arthur.
His mother was charmed to see him in such high spirits, and welcomed
Mr. Smirke for his sake, when Arthur said he had forced the curate back
to dine. He gave a most ludicrous account of the play of the night
before, and of the acting of Bingley the Manager, in his rickety
Hessians, and the enormous Mrs. Bingley as the Countess, in rumpled
green satin and a Polish cap; he mimicked them, and delighted his
mother and little Laura, who clapped her hands with pleasure.

“And Mrs. Haller?” said Mrs. Pendennis.

“She’s a stunner, ma’am,” Pen said, laughing, and using the words of
his revered friend, Mr. Foker.

“A what, Arthur?” asked the lady.

“What is a stunner, Arthur?” cried Laura, in the same voice.

So he gave them a queer account of Mr. Foker, and how he used to be
called Vats and Grains, and by other contumelious names at school: and
how he was now exceedingly rich, and a Fellow Commoner at St. Boniface.
But gay and communicative as he was, Mr. Pen did not say one syllable
about his ride to Chatteris that day, or about the new friends whom he
had made there.

When the two ladies retired, Pen, with flashing eyes, filled up two
great bumpers of Madeira, and looking Smirke full in the face said,
“Here’s to her!”

“Here’s to her,” said the curate with a sigh, lifting the glass and
emptying it, so that his face was a little pink when he put it down.

Pen had even less sleep that night than on the night before. In the
morning, and almost before dawn, he went out and saddled that
unfortunate Rebecca himself, and rode her on the Downs like mad. Again
Love had roused him—and said, “Awake, Pendennis, I am here.” That
charming fever—that delicious longing—and fire, and uncertainty; he
hugged them to him—he would not have lost them for all the world.




CHAPTER VI.
Contains both Love and War


Cicero and Euripides did not occupy Mr. Pen much for some time after
this, and honest Mr. Smirke had a very easy time with his pupil.
Rebecca was the animal who suffered most in the present state of Pen’s
mind, for, besides those days when he could publicly announce his
intention of going to Chatteris to take a fencing-lesson, and went
thither with the knowledge of his mother, whenever he saw three hours
clear before him, the young rascal made a rush for the city, and found
his way to Prior’s Lane. He was as frantic with vexation when Rebecca
went lame, as Richard at Bosworth, when his horse was killed under him:
and got deeply into the books of the man who kept the hunting-stables
at Chatteris for the doctoring of his own, and the hire of another
animal.

Then, and perhaps once in a week, under pretence of going to read a
Greek play with Smirke, this young reprobate set off so as to be in
time for the Competitor down coach, stayed a couple of hours in
Chatteris, and returned on the Rival which left for London at ten at
night. Once his secret was nearly lost by Smirke’s simplicity, of whom
Mrs. Pendennis asked whether they had read a great deal the night
before, or a question to that effect. Smirke was about to tell the
truth, that he had never seen Mr. Pen at all, when the latter’s
boot-heel came grinding down on Mr. Smirke’s toe under the table, and
warned the curate not to betray him.

They had had conversations on the tender subject, of course. It is good
sport (if you are not yourself engaged in the conversation) to hear two
men in love talk. There must be a confidant and depositary somewhere.
When informed, under the most solemn vows of secrecy, of Pen’s
condition of mind, the curate said, with no small tremor, “that he
hoped it was no unworthy object—no unlawful attachment, which Pen had
formed”—for if so, the poor fellow felt it would be his duty to break
his vow and inform Pen’s mother, and then there would be a quarrel, he
felt, with sickening apprehension, and he would never again have a
chance of seeing what he most liked in the world.

“Unlawful, unworthy!” Pen bounced out at the curate’s question. “She is
as pure as she is beautiful; I would give my heart to no other woman. I
keep the matter a secret in my family, because—because—there are
reasons of a weighty nature which I am not at liberty to disclose. But
any man who breathes a word against her purity insults both her honour
and mine, and—and dammy, I won’t stand it.”

Smirke, with a faint laugh, only said, “Well, well, don’t call me out,
Arthur, for you know I can’t fight;” but by this compromise the
wretched curate was put more than ever into the power of his pupil, and
the Greek and mathematics suffered correspondingly.

If the reverend gentleman had had much discernment, and looked into the
Poet’s Corner of the County Chronicle, as it arrived in the Wednesday’s
bag, he might have seen ‘Mrs. Haller,’ ‘Passion and Genius,’ ‘Lines to
Miss Fotheringay, of the Theatre Royal,’ appearing every week; and
other verses of the most gloomy, thrilling, and passionate cast. But as
these poems were no longer signed NEP by their artful composer, but
subscribed EROS, neither the tutor nor Helen, the good soul, who cut
all her son’s verses out of the paper, knew that Nep was no other than
that flaming Eros, who sang so vehemently the character of the new
actress.

“Who is the lady,” at last asked Mrs. Pendennis, “whom your rival is
always singing in the County Chronicle? He writes something like you,
dear Pen, but yours is much the best. Have you seen Miss Fotheringay?”

Pen said yes, he had; that night he went to see the “Stranger,” she
acted Mrs. Haller. By the way, she was going to have a benefit, and was
to appear in Ophelia—suppose we were to go—Shakspeare, you know,
mother—we can get horses from the Clavering Arms. Little Laura sprang
up with delight, she longed for a play.

Pen introduced “Shakspeare, you know,” because the deceased Pendennis,
as became a man of his character, professed an uncommon respect for the
bard of Avon, in whose works he safely said there was more poetry than
in all ‘Johnson’s Poets’ put together. And though Mr. Pendennis did not
much read the works in question, yet he enjoined Pen to peruse them,
and often said what pleasure he should have, when the boy was of a
proper age, in taking him and mother to see some good plays of the
immortal poet.

The ready tears welled up in the kind mother’s eyes as she remembered
these speeches of the man who was gone. She kissed her son fondly, and
said she would go. Laura jumped for joy. Was Pen happy?—was he ashamed?
As he held his mother to him, he longed to tell her all, but he kept
his counsel. He would see how his mother liked her; the play should be
the thing, and he would try his mother like Hamlet’s.

Helen, in her good humour, asked Mr. Smirke to be of the party. That
ecclesiastic had been bred up by a fond parent at Clapham, who had an
objection to dramatic entertainments, and he had never yet seen a play.
But, Shakspeare!—but to go with Mrs. Pendennis in her carriage, and sit
a whole night by her side!—he could not resist the idea of so much
pleasure, and made a feeble speech, in which he spoke of temptation and
gratitude, and finally accepted Mrs. Pendennis’s most kind offer. As he
spoke he gave her a look, which made her exceedingly uncomfortable. She
had seen that look more than once, of late, pursuing her. He became
more positively odious every day in the widow’s eyes.

We are not going to say a great deal about Pen’s courtship of Miss
Fotheringay, for the reader has already had a specimen of her
conversation, much of which need surely not be reported. Pen sate with
her hour after hour, and poured forth all his honest boyish soul to
her. Everything he knew, or hoped, or felt, or had read, or fancied, he
told to her. He never tired of talking and longing. One after another,
as his thoughts rose in his hot eager brain, he clothed them in words,
and told them to her. Her part of the tete-a-tete was not to talk, but
to appear as if she understood what Pen talked (a difficult matter, for
the young fellow blurted out no small quantity of nonsense), and to
look exceedingly handsome and sympathising. The fact is, whilst he was
making one of his tirades—and delighted, perhaps, and wondering at his
own eloquence, the lad would go on for twenty minutes at a time—the
lovely Emily, who could not comprehend a tenth part of his talk, had
leisure to think about her own affairs, and would arrange in her own
mind how they should dress the cold mutton, or how she would turn the
black satin, or make herself out of her scarf a bonnet like Miss
Thackthwaite’s new one, and so forth. Pen spouted Byron and Moore;
passion and poetry: her business was to throw up her eyes, or fixing
them for a moment on his face, to cry, “Oh, ’tis beautiful! Ah, how
exquisite! Repeat those lines again.” And off the boy went, and she
returned to her own simple thoughts about the turned gown, or the
hashed mutton.

In fact Pen’s passion was not long a secret from the lovely Emily or
her father. Upon his second visit, his admiration was quite evident to
both of them, and on his departure the old gentleman said to his
daughter, as he winked at her over his glass of grog, “Faith, Milly
darling, I think ye’ve hooked that chap.”

“Pooh, ’tis only a boy, papa dear,” Milly remarked. “Sure he’s but a
child.” Pen would have been very much pleased if he had heard that
phrase—he was galloping home wild with pleasure, and shouting out her
name as he rode.

“Ye’ve hooked ’um any how,” said the Captain, “and let me tell ye he’s
not a bad fish. I asked Tom at the George, and Flint, the grocer, where
his mother dales—fine fortune—drives in her chariot—splendid park and
grounds—Fairoaks Park—only son—property all his own at twenty-one—ye
might go further and not fare so well, Miss Fotheringay.”

“Them boys are mostly talk,” said Milly, seriously. “Ye know at Dublin
how ye went on about young Poldoody, and I’ve a whole desk full of
verses he wrote me when he was in Trinity College; but he went abroad,
and his mother married him to an Englishwoman.”

“Lord Poldoody was a young nobleman; and in them it’s natural: and ye
weren’t in the position in which ye are now, Milly dear. But ye mustn’t
encourage this young chap too much, for, bedad, Jack Costigan won’t
have any thrifling with his daughter.”

“No more will his daughter, papa, you may be sure of that,” Milly said.
“A little sip more of the punch,—sure, ’tis beautiful. Ye needn’t be
afraid about the young chap—I think I’m old enough to take care of
myself, Captain Costigan.”

So Pen used to come day after day, rushing in and galloping away, and
growing more wild about the girl with every visit. Sometimes the
Captain was present at their meetings; but having a perfect confidence
in his daughter, he was more often inclined to leave the young couple
to themselves, and cocked his hat over his eye, and strutted off on
some errand when Pen entered. How delightful those interviews were! The
Captain’s drawing-room was a low wainscoted room, with a large window
looking into the Dean’s garden. There Pen sate and talked—and
talked—Emily, looking beautiful as she sate at her work—looking
beautiful and calm, and the sunshine came streaming in at the great
windows, and lighted up her superb face and form. In the midst of the
conversation, the great bell would begin to boom, and he would pause
smiling, and be silent until the sound of the vast music died away—or
the rooks in the cathedral elms would make a great noise towards
sunset—or the sound of the organ and the choristers would come over the
quiet air, and gently hush Pen’s talking.

By the way, it must be said that Miss Fotheringay, in a plain shawl and
a close bonnet and veil, went to church every Sunday of her life,
accompanied by her indefatigable father, who gave the responses in a
very rich and fine brogue, joined in the psalms and chanting, and
behaved in the most exemplary manner.

Little Bows, the house-friend of the family, was exceedingly wroth at
the notion of Miss Fotheringay’s marriage with a stripling seven or
eight years her junior. Bows, who was a cripple, and owned that he was
a little more deformed even than Bingley the manager, so that he could
not appear on the stage, was a singular wild man of no small talents
and humour. Attracted first by Miss Fotheringay’s beauty, he began to
teach her how to act. He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts,
and his pupil learned them from his lips by rote, and repeated them in
her full rich tones. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved
those beautiful arms of hers. Those who remember this grand actress on
the stage can recall how she used always precisely the same gestures,
looks, and tones; how she stood on the same plank of the stage in the
same position, rolled her eyes at the same instant and to the same
degree, and wept with precisely the same heart-rending pathos and over
the same pathetic syllable. And after she had come out trembling with
emotion before the audience, and looking so exhausted and tearful that
you fancied she would faint with sensibility, she would gather up her
hair the instant she was behind the curtain, and go home to a
mutton-chop and a glass of brown stout; and the harrowing labours of
the day over, she went to bed and snored as resolutely and as regularly
as a porter.

Bows then was indignant at the notion that his pupil should throw her
chances away in life by bestowing her hand upon a little country
squire. As soon as a London manager saw her he prophesied that she
would get a London engagement, and a great success. The misfortune was
that the London managers had seen her. She had played in London three
years before, and failed from utter stupidity. Since then it was that
Bows had taken her in hand and taught her part after part. How he
worked and screamed, and twisted, and repeated lines over and over
again, and with what indomitable patience and dulness she followed him!
She knew that he made her: and let herself be made. She was not
grateful, or ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humoured. She was only
stupid; and Pen was madly in love with her.

The post-horses from the Clavering Arms arrived in due time, and
carried the party to the theatre at Chatteris, where Pen was gratified
in perceiving that a tolerably large audience was assembled. The young
gentlemen from Baymouth had a box, in the front of which sate Mr. Foker
and his friend Mr. Spavin, splendidly attired in the most full-blown
evening costume. They saluted Pen in a cordial manner, and examined his
party, of which they approved, for little Laura was a pretty little
red-cheeked girl with a quantity of shining brown ringlets, and Mrs.
Pendennis, dressed in black velvet with the diamond cross which she
sported on great occasions, looked uncommonly handsome and majestic.
Behind these sate Mr. Arthur, and the gentle Smirke with the curl
reposing on his fair forehead, and his white tie in perfect order. He
blushed to find himself in such a place—but how happy was he to be
there! He and Mrs. Pendennis brought books of ‘Hamlet’ with them to
follow the tragedy, as is the custom of honest countryfolks who go to a
play in state. Samuel, coachman, groom, and gardener to Mr. Pendennis,
took his place in the pit, where Mr. Foker’s man was also visible. It
was dotted with non-commissioned officers of the Dragoons, whose band,
by kind permission of Colonel Swallowtail, were, as usual, in the
orchestra; and that corpulent and distinguished warrior himself, with
his Waterloo medal and a number of his young men, made a handsome show
in the boxes.

“Who is that odd-looking person bowing to you, Arthur?” Mrs. Pendennis
asked of her son.

Pen blushed a great deal. “His name is Captain Costigan, ma’am,” he
said—“a Peninsular officer.” In fact it was the Captain in a new shoot
of clothes, as he called them, and with a large pair of white kid
gloves, one of which he waved to Pendennis, whilst he laid the other
sprawling over his heart and coat-buttons. Pen did not say any more.
And how was Mrs. Pendennis to know that Mr. Costigan was the father of
Miss Fotheringay?

Mr. Hornbull, from London, was the Hamlet of the night, Mr. Bingley
modestly contenting himself with the part of Horatio, and reserving his
chief strength for William in ‘Black-Eyed Susan,’ which was the second
piece.

We have nothing to do with the play: except to say that Ophelia looked
lovely, and performed with admirable wild pathos laughing, weeping,
gazing wildly, waving her beautiful white arms, and flinging about her
snatches of flowers and songs with the most charming madness. What an
opportunity her splendid black hair had of tossing over her shoulders!
She made the most charming corpse ever seen; and while Hamlet and
Laertes were battling in her grave, she was looking out from the back
scenes with some curiosity towards Pen’s box, and the family party
assembled in it.

There was but one voice in her praise there. Mrs. Pendennis was in
ecstasies with her beauty. Little Laura was bewildered by the piece,
and the Ghost, and the play within the play (during which, as Hamlet
lay at Ophelia’s knee, Pen felt that he would have liked to strangle
Mr. Hornbull), but cried out great praises of that beautiful young
creature. Pen was charmed with the effect which she produced on his
mother—and the clergyman, for his part, was exceedingly enthusiastic.

When the curtain fell upon that group of slaughtered personages, who
are despatched so suddenly at the end of ‘Hamlet,’ and whose demise
astonished poor little Laura not a little, there was an immense
shouting and applause from all quarters of the house; the intrepid
Smirke, violently excited, clapped his hands, and cried out “Bravo,
Bravo,” as loud as the Dragoon officers themselves. These were greatly
moved,—ils s’agitaient sur leurs bancs,—to borrow a phrase from our
neighbours. They were led cheering into action by the portly
Swallowtail, who waved his cap—the non-commissioned officers in the
pit, of course, gallantly following their chiefs. There was a roar of
bravos rang through the house; Pen bellowing with the loudest,
“Fotheringay! Fotheringay!” and Messrs. Spavin and Foker giving the
view-halloo from their box. Even Mrs. Pendennis began to wave about her
pocket-handkerchief, and little Laura danced, laughed, clapped, and
looked up at Pen with wonder.

Hornbull led the beneficiaire forward, amidst bursts of enthusiasm—and
she looked so handsome and radiant, with her hair still over her
shoulders, that Pen hardly could contain himself for rapture: and he
leaned over his mother’s chair, and shouted, and hurrayed, and waved
his hat. It was all he could do to keep his secret from Helen, and not
say, “Look! That’s the woman! Isn’t she peerless? I tell you I love
her.” But he disguised these feelings under an enormous bellowing and
hurraying.

As for Miss Fotheringay and her behaviour, the reader is referred to a
former page for an account of that. She went through precisely the same
business. She surveyed the house all round with glances of gratitude;
and trembled, and almost sank with emotion, over her favourite
trap-door. She seized the flowers (Foker discharged a prodigious
bouquet at her, and even Smirke made a feeble shy with a rose, and
blushed dreadfully when it fell into the pit). She seized the flowers
and pressed them to her swelling heart—etc., etc.—in a word—we refer
the reader to earlier pages. Twinkling in her breast poor old Pen saw a
locket which he had bought of Mr. Nathan in High Street, with the last
shilling he was worth, and a sovereign borrowed from Smirke.

‘Black-Eyed Susan’ followed, at which sweet story our gentle-hearted
friends were exceedingly charmed and affected: and in which Susan, with
a russet gown and a pink ribbon in her cap, looked to the full as
lovely as Ophelia. Bingley was great in William. Goll, as the Admiral,
looked like the figure-head of a seventy-four; and Garbetts, as Captain
Boldweather, a miscreant who forms a plan for carrying off Black-eyed
Susan, and waving an immense cocked hat says, “Come what may, he will
be the ruin of her”—all these performed their parts with their
accustomed talent; and it was with a sincere regret that all our
friends saw the curtain drop down and end that pretty and tender story.

If Pen had been alone with his mother in the carriage as they went
home, he would have told her all, that night; but he sate on the box in
the moonshine smoking a cigar by the side of Smirke, who warmed himself
with a comforter. Mr. Foker’s tandem and lamps whirled by the sober old
Clavering posters as they were a couple of miles on their road home,
and Mr. Spavin saluted Mrs. Pendennis’s carriage with some considerable
variations of Rule Britannia on the key-bugle.

It happened two days after the above gaieties that Mr. Dean of
Chatteris entertained a few select clerical friends at dinner at his
Deanery Home. That they drank uncommonly good port wine, and abused the
Bishop over their dessert, are very likely matters: but with such we
have nothing at present to do. Our friend Doctor Portman, of Clavering,
was one of the Dean’s guests, and being a gallant man, and seeing from
his place at the mahogany the Dean’s lady walking up and down the
grass, with her children sporting around her, and her pink parasol over
her lovely head—the Doctor stept out of the French windows of the
dining-room into the lawn, which skirts that apartment, and left the
other white neckcloths to gird at my lord Bishop. Then the Doctor went
up and offered Mrs. Dean his arm, and they sauntered over the ancient
velvet lawn, which had been mowed and rolled for immemorial Deans, in
that easy, quiet, comfortable manner, in which people of middle age and
good temper walk after a good dinner, in a calm golden summer evening,
when the sun has but just sunk behind the enormous cathedral-towers,
and the sickle-shaped moon is growing every instant brighter in the
heavens.

Now at the end of the Dean’s garden there is, as we have stated, Mrs.
Creed’s house, and the windows of the first-floor room were open to
admit the pleasant summer air. A young lady of six-and-twenty, whose
eyes were perfectly wide open, and a luckless boy of eighteen, blind
with love and infatuation, were in that chamber together; in which
persons, as we have before seen them in the same place, the reader will
have no difficulty in recognising Mr. Arthur Pendennis and Miss
Costigan.

The poor boy had taken the plunge. Trembling with passionate emotion,
his heart beating and throbbing fiercely, tears rushing forth in spite
of him, his voice almost choking with feeling, poor Pen had said those
words which he could withhold no more, and flung himself and his whole
store of love, and admiration, and ardour at the feet of this mature
beauty. Is he the first who has done so? Have none before or after him
staked all their treasure of life, as a savage does his land and
possessions against a draught of the fair-skins’ fire-water, or a
couple of bauble eyes?

“Does your mother know of this, Arthur?” said Miss Fotheringay, slowly.
He seized her hand madly and kissed it a thousand times. She did not
withdraw it. “Does the old lady know it?” Miss Costigan thought to
herself, “well, perhaps she may,” and then she remembered what a
handsome diamond cross Mrs. Pendennis had on the night of the play, and
thought, “Sure ’twill go in the family.”

“Calm yourself, dear Arthur,” she said, in her low rich voice, and
sniffled sweetly and gravely upon him. Then, with her disengaged hand,
she put the hair lightly off his throbbing forehead. He was in such a
rapture and whirl of happiness that he could hardly speak. At last he
gasped out, “My mother has seen you, and admires you beyond measure.
She will learn to love you soon: who can do otherwise? She will love
you because I do.”

“’Deed then, I think you do,” said Miss Costigan, perhaps with a sort
of pity for Pen.

Think she did! Of course here Mr. Pen went off into a rhapsody through
which, as we have perfect command over our own feelings, we have no
reason to follow the lad. Of course, love, truth, and eternity were
produced: and words were tried but found impossible to plumb the
tremendous depth of his affection. This speech, we say, is no business
of ours. It was most likely not very wise, but what right have we to
overhear? Let the poor boy fling out his simple heart at the woman’s
feet, and deal gently with him. It is best to love wisely, no doubt:
but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.
Some of us can’t: and are proud of our impotence too.

At the end of his speech Pen again kissed the imperial hand with
rapture—and I believe it was at this very moment, and while Mrs. Dean
and Doctor Portman were engaged in conversation, that young Master
Ridley Roset, her son, pulled his mother by the back of her capacious
dress and said—

“I say, ma! look up there”—and he waggled his innocent head.

That was, indeed, a view from the Dean’s garden such as seldom is seen
by Deans—or is written in Chapters. There was poor Pen performing a
salute upon the rosy fingers of his charmer, who received the embrace
with perfect calmness and good humour. Master Ridley looked up and
grinned, little Miss Rosa looked at her brother, and opened the mouth
of astonishment. Mrs. Dean’s countenance defied expression, and as for
Dr. Portman, when he beheld the scene, and saw his prime favourite and
dear pupil Pen, he stood mute with rage and wonder.

Mrs. Haller spied the party below at the same moment, and gave a start
and a laugh. “Sure there’s somebody in the Dean’s garden,” she cried
out; and withdrew with perfect calmness, whilst Pen darted away with
his face glowing like coals. The garden party had re-entered the house
when he ventured to look out again. The sickle moon was blazing bright
in the heavens then, the stars were glittering, the bell of the
cathedral tolling nine, the Dean’s guests (all save one, who had called
for his horse Dumpling, and ridden off early) were partaking of tea and
buttered cakes in Mrs. Dean’s drawing-room—when Pen took leave of Miss
Costigan.

Pen arrived at home in due time afterwards, and was going to slip off
to bed, for the poor lad was greatly worn and agitated, and his
high-strung nerves had been at almost a maddening pitch when a summons
came to him by John the old footman, whose countenance bore a very
ominous look, that his mother must see him below.

On this he tied on his neckcloth again, and went downstairs to the
drawing-room. There sate not only his mother, but her friend, the
Reverend Doctor Portman. Helen’s face looked very pale by the light of
the lamp—the Doctor’s was flushed, on the contrary, and quivering with
anger and emotion.

Pen saw at once that there was a crisis, and that there had been a
discovery. “Now for it,” he thought.

“Where have you been, Arthur?” Helen said in a trembling voice.

“How can you look that—that dear lady, and a Christian clergyman in the
face, sir?” bounced out the Doctor, in spite of Helen’s pale, appealing
looks. “Where has he been? Where his mother’s son should have been
ashamed to go. For your mother’s an angel, sir, an angel. How dare you
bring pollution into her house, and make that spotless creature
wretched with the thoughts of your crime?”

“Sir!” said Pen.

“Don’t deny it, sir,” roared the Doctor. “Don’t add lies, sir, to your
other infamy. I saw you myself, sir. I saw you from the Dean’s garden.
I saw you kissing the hand of that infernal painted—-”

“Stop,” Pen said, clapping his fist on the table, till the lamp
flickered up and shook, “I am a very young man, but you will please to
remember that I am a gentleman—I will hear no abuse of that lady.”

“Lady, sir,” cried the Doctor, “that a lady—you—you—you stand in your
mother’s presence and call that—that woman a lady!—-”

“In anybody’s presence,” shouted out Pen. “She is worthy of any place.
She is as pure as any woman. She is as good as she is beautiful. If any
man but you insulted her, I would tell him what I thought; but as you
are my oldest friend, I suppose you have the privilege to doubt of my
honour.”

“No, no, Pen, dearest Pen,” cried out Helen in an excess of joy. “I
told, I told you, Doctor, he was not—not what you thought:” and the
tender creature coming trembling forward flung herself on Pen’s
shoulder.

Pen felt himself a man, and a match for all the Doctors in Doctordom.
He was glad this explanation had come. “You saw how beautiful she was,”
he said to his mother, with a soothing, protecting air, like Hamlet
with Gertrude in the play. “I tell you, dear mother, she is as good.
When you know her you will say so. She is of all, except you, the
simplest, the kindest, the most affectionate of women. Why should she
not be on the stage?—She maintains her father by her labour.”

“Drunken old reprobate,” growled the Doctor, but Pen did not hear or
heed.

“If you could see, as I have, how orderly her life is, how pure and
pious her whole conduct, you would—as I do—yes, as I do”—(with a savage
look at the Doctor)—“spurn the slanderer who dared to do her wrong. Her
father was an officer, and distinguished himself in Spain. He was a
friend of His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, and is intimately known
to the Duke of Wellington, and some of the first officers of our army.
He has met my uncle Arthur at Lord Hill’s, he thinks. His own family is
one of the most ancient and respectable in Ireland, and indeed is as
good as our own. The Costigans were kings of Ireland.”

“Why, God bless my soul,” shrieked out the Doctor, hardly knowing
whether to burst with rage or laughter, “you don’t mean to say you want
to marry her?”

Pen put on his most princely air. “What else, Dr. Portman,” he said,
“do you suppose would be my desire?”

Utterly foiled in his attack, and knocked down by this sudden lunge of
Pen’s, the Doctor could only gasp out, “Mrs. Pendennis, ma’am, send for
the Major.”

“Send for the Major? with all my heart,” said Arthur Prince of
Pendennis and Grand Duke of Fairoaks, with a most superb wave of the
hand. And the colloquy terminated by the writing of those two letters
which were laid on Major Pendennis’s breakfast-table, in London, at the
commencement of Prince Arthur’s most veracious history.




CHAPTER VII.
In which the Major makes his Appearance


Our acquaintance, Major Arthur Pendennis, arrived in due time at
Fairoaks, after a dreary night passed in the mail-coach, where a stout
fellow-passenger, swelling preternaturally with great-coats, had
crowded him into a corner, and kept him awake by snoring indecently;
where a widow lady, opposite, had not only shut out the fresh air by
closing all the windows of the vehicle, but had filled the interior
with fumes of Jamaica rum and water, which she sucked perpetually from
a bottle in her reticule; where, whenever he caught a brief moment of
sleep, the twanging of the horn at the turnpike-gates, or the scuffling
of his huge neighbour wedging him closer and closer, or the play of the
widow’s feet on his own tender toes, speedily woke up the poor
gentleman to the horrors and realities of life—a life which has passed
away now and become impossible, and only lives in fond memories. Eight
miles an hour, for twenty or five-and-twenty hours, a tight mail-coach,
a hard seat, a gouty tendency, a perpetual change of coachmen grumbling
because you did not fee them enough, a fellow-passenger partial to
spirits-and-water,—who has not borne with these evils in the jolly old
times? and how could people travel under such difficulties? And yet
they did, and were merry too. Next the widow, and by the side of the
Major’s servant on the roof, were a couple of school-boys going home
for the midsummer holidays, and Major Pendennis wondered to see them
sup at the inn at Bagshot, where they took in a cargo of ham, eggs,
pie, pickles, tea, coffee, and boiled beef, which surprised the poor
Major, sipping a cup of very feeble tea, and thinking with a tender
dejection that Lord Steyne’s dinner was coming off at that very moment.
The ingenuous ardour of the boys, however, amused the Major, who was
very good-natured, and he became the more interested when he found that
the one who travelled inside with him was a lord’s son, whose noble
father Pendennis, of course, had met in the world of fashion which he
frequented. The little lord slept all night through, in spite of the
squeezing, and the horn-blowing, and the widow; and he looked as fresh
as paint (and, indeed; pronounced himself to be so) when the Major,
with a yellow face, a bristly beard, a wig out of curl, and strong
rheumatic griefs shooting through various limbs of his uneasy body,
descended at the little lodge-gate at Fairoaks, where the porteress and
gardener’s wife reverentially greeted him, and, still more
respectfully, Mr. Morgan, his man.

Helen was on the look-out for this expected guest, and saw him from her
window. But she did not come forward immediately to greet him. She knew
the Major did not like to be seen at a surprise, and required a little
preparation before he cared to be visible. Pen, when a boy, had
incurred sad disgrace by carrying off from the Major’s dressing-table a
little morocco box, which it must be confessed contained the Major’s
back teeth, which he naturally would leave out of his jaws in a jolting
mail-coach, and without which he would not choose to appear. Morgan,
his man, made a mystery of mystery of his wigs: curling them in private
places: introducing them mysteriously to his master’s room;—nor without
his head of hair would the Major care to show himself to any member of
his family, or any acquaintance. He went to his apartment then and
supplied these deficiencies; he groaned, and moaned, and wheezed, and
cursed Morgan through his toilet, as an old buck will, who has been up
all night with a rheumatism, and has a long duty to perform. And
finally being belted, curled, and set straight, he descended upon the
drawing-room, with a grave majestic air, such as befitted one who was
at once a man of business and a man of fashion.

Pen was not there, however; only Helen, and little Laura sewing at her
knees; and to whom he never presented more than a forefinger, as he did
on this occasion after saluting his sister-in-law. Laura took the
finger trembling and dropped it—and then fled out of the room. Major
Pendennis did not want to keep her, or indeed to have her in the house
at all, and had his private reason for disapproving of her: which we
may mention on some future occasion. Meanwhile Laura disappeared and
wandered about the premises seeking for Pen: whom she presently found
in the orchard, pacing up and down a walk there in earnest conversation
with Mr. Smirke. He was so occupied that he did not hear Laura’s clear
voice singing out, until Smirke pulled him by the coat and pointed
towards her as she came running.

She ran up and put her hand into his. “Come in, Pen,” she said,
“there’s somebody come; uncle Arthur’s come.”

“He is, is he?” said Pen, and she felt him grasp her little hand. He
looked round at Smirke with uncommon fierceness, as much as to say, I
am ready for him or any man.—Mr. Smirke cast up his eyes as usual and
heaved a gentle sigh.

“Lead on, Laura,” Pen said, with a half fierce, half comic air—“Lead
on, and say I wait upon my uncle.” But he was laughing in order to hide
a great anxiety: and was screwing his courage inwardly to face the
ordeal which he knew was now before him.

Pen had taken Smirke into his confidence in the last two days, and
after the outbreak attendant on the discovery of Doctor Portman, and
during every one of those forty-eight hours which he had passed in Mr.
Smirke’s society, had done nothing but talk to his tutor about Miss
Fotheringay—Miss Emily Fotheringay—Emily, etc., to all which talk
Smirke listened without difficulty, for he was in love himself, most
anxious in all things to propitiate Pen, and indeed very much himself
enraptured by the personal charms of this goddess, whose like, never
having been before at a theatrical representation, he had not beheld
until now. Pen’s fire and volubility, his hot eloquence and rich
poetical tropes and figures, his manly heart, kind, ardent, and
hopeful, refusing to see any defects in the person he loved, any
difficulties in their position that he might not overcome, had half
convinced Mr. Smirke that the arrangement proposed by Mr. Pen was a
very feasible and prudent one, and that it would be a great comfort to
have Emily settled at Fairoaks, Captain Costigan in the yellow room,
established for life there, and Pen married at eighteen.

And it is a fact that in these two days the boy had almost talked over
his mother, too; had parried all her objections one after another with
that indignant good sense which is often the perfection of absurdity;
and had brought her almost to acquiesce in the belief that if the
marriage was doomed in heaven, why doomed it was—that if the young
woman was a good person, it was all that she for her part had to ask;
and rather to dread the arrival of the guardian uncle who she foresaw
would regard Mr. Pen’s marriage in a manner very different to that
simple, romantic, honest, and utterly absurd way in which the widow was
already disposed to look at questions of this sort.

For as in the old allegory of the gold and silver shield, about which
the two knights quarrelled, each is right according to the point from
which he looks: so about marriage; the question whether it is foolish
or good, wise or otherwise, depends upon the point of view from which
you regard it. If it means a snug house in Belgravia, and pretty little
dinner-parties, and a pretty little brougham to drive in the Park, and
a decent provision not only for the young people, but for the little
Belgravians to come; and if these are the necessaries of life (and they
are with many honest people), to talk of any other arrangement is an
absurdity: of love in lodgings—a babyish folly of affection: that can’t
pay coach-hire or afford a decent milliner—as mere wicked balderdash
and childish romance. If on the other hand your opinion is that people,
not with an assured subsistence, but with a fair chance to obtain it,
and with the stimulus of hope, health, and strong affection, may take
the chance of Fortune for better or worse, and share its good or its
evil together, the polite theory then becomes an absurdity in its turn:
worse than an absurdity, a blasphemy almost, and doubt of Providence;
and a man who waits to make his chosen woman happy, until he can drive
her to church in a neat little carriage with a pair of horses, is no
better than a coward or a trifler, who is neither worthy of love nor of
fortune.

I don’t say that the town folks are not right, but Helen Pendennis was
a country-bred woman, and the book of life, as she interpreted it, told
her a different story to that page which is read in cities. Like most
soft and sentimental women, matchmaking, in general, formed a great
part of her thoughts, and I daresay she had begun to speculate about
her son’s falling in love and marrying long before the subject had ever
entered into the brains of the young gentleman. It pleased her (with
that dismal pleasure which the idea of sacrificing themselves gives to
certain women) to think of the day when she would give up all to Pen,
and he should bring his wife home, and she would surrender the keys and
the best bedroom, and go and sit at the side of the table, and see him
happy. What did she want in life, but to see the lad prosper? As an
empress certainly was not too good for him, and would be honoured by
becoming Mrs. Pen; so if he selected humble Esther instead of Queen
Vashti, she would be content with his lordship’s choice. Never mind how
lowly or poor the person might be who was to enjoy that prodigious
honour, Mrs. Pendennis was willing to bow before her and welcome her,
and yield her up the first place. But an actress—a mature woman, who
had long ceased blushing except with rouge, as she stood under the
eager glances of thousands of eyes—an illiterate and ill-bred person,
very likely, who must have lived with light associates, and have heard
doubtful conversation—Oh! it was hard that such a one should be chosen,
and that the matron should be deposed to give place to such a Sultana.

All these doubts the widow laid before Pen during the two days which
had of necessity to elapse ere the uncle came down; but he met them
with that happy frankness and ease which a young gentleman exhibits at
his time of life, and routed his mother’s objections with infinite
satisfaction to himself. Miss Costigan was a paragon of virtue and
delicacy; she was as sensitive as the most timid maiden; she was as
pure as the unsullied snow; she had the finest manners, the most
graceful wit and genius, the most charming refinement and justness of
appreciation in all matters of taste; she had the most admirable temper
and devotion to her father, a good old gentleman of high family and
fallen fortunes, who had lived, however, with the best society in
Europe: he was in no hurry, and could afford to wait any time,—till he
was one-and-twenty. But he felt (and here his face assumed an awful and
harrowing solemnity) that he was engaged in the one only passion of his
life, and that DEATH alone could close it.

Helen told him, with a sad smile and shake of the head, that people
survived these passions, and as for long engagements contracted between
very young men and old women—she knew an instance in her own
family—Laura’s poor father was an instance—how fatal they were.

Mr. Pen, however, was resolved that death must be his doom in case of
disappointment, and rather than this—rather than baulk him, in
fact—this lady would have submitted to any sacrifice or personal pain,
and would have gone down on her knees and have kissed the feet of a
Hottentot daughter-in-law.

Arthur knew his power over the widow, and the young tyrant was touched
whilst he exercised it. In those two days he brought her almost into
submission, and patronised her very kindly; and he passed one evening
with the lovely pie-maker at Chatteris, in which he bragged of his
influence over his mother; and he spent the other night in composing a
most flaming and conceited copy of verses to his divinity, in which he
vowed, like Montrose, that he would make her famous with his sword and
glorious by his pen, and that he would love her as no mortal woman had
been adored since the creation of womankind.

It was on that night, long after midnight, that wakeful Helen, passing
stealthily by her son’s door, saw a light streaming through the chink
of the door into the dark passage, and heard Pen tossing and tumbling,
and mumbling verses in his bed. She waited outside for a while,
anxiously listening to him. In infantile fevers and early boyish
illnesses, many a night before, the kind soul had so kept watch. She
turned the lock very softly now, and went in so gently, that Pen for a
moment did not see her. His face was turned from her. His papers on his
desk were scattered about, and more were lying on the bed round him. He
was biting a pencil and thinking of rhymes and all sorts of follies and
passions. He was Hamlet jumping into Ophelia’s grave: he was the
Stranger taking Mrs. Haller to his arms, beautiful Mrs. Haller, with
the raven ringlets falling over her shoulders. Despair and Byron,
Thomas Moore and all the Loves of the Angels, Waller and Herrick,
Beranger and all the love-songs he had ever read, were working and
seething in this young gentleman’s mind, and he was at the very height
and paroxysm of the imaginative frenzy when his mother found him.

“Arthur,” said the mother’s soft silver voice: and he started up and
turned round. He clutched some of the papers and pushed them under the
pillow.

“Why don’t you go to sleep, my dear?” she said, with a sweet tender
smile, and sate down on the bed and took one of his hot hands.

Pen looked at her wildly for an instant—“I couldn’t sleep,” he
said—“I—I was—I was writing.”—And hereupon he flung his arms round her
neck and said, “O mother! I love her, I love her!”—How could such a
kind soul as that help soothing and pitying him? The gentle creature
did her best: and thought with a strange wonderment and tenderness that
it was only yesterday that he was a child in that bed; and how she used
to come and say her prayers over it before he woke upon holiday
mornings.

They were very grand verses, no doubt, although Miss Fotheringay did
not understand them; but old Cos, with a wink and a knowing finger on
his nose, said, “Put them up with th’ other letthers, Milly darling.
Poldoody’s pomes was nothing to this.” So Milly locked up the
manuscripts.

When then, the Major being dressed and presentable, presented himself
to Mrs. Pendennis, he found in the course of ten minutes’ colloquy that
the poor widow was not merely distressed at the idea of the marriage
contemplated by Pen, but actually more distressed at thinking that the
boy himself was unhappy about it, and that his uncle and he should have
any violent altercation on the subject. She besought Major Pendennis to
be very gentle with Arthur: “He has a very high spirit, and will not
brook unkind words,” she hinted. “Dr. Portman spoke to him rather
roughly—and I must own unjustly, the other night—for my dearest boy’s
honour is as high as any mother can desire—but Pen’s answer quite
frightened me, it was so indignant. Recollect he is a man now; and be
very—very cautious,” said the widow, laying a fair long hand on the
Major’s sleeve.

He took it up, kissed it gallantly and looked in her alarmed face with
wonder, and a scorn which he was too polite to show. “Bon Dieu!”
thought the old negotiator, “the boy has actually talked the woman
round, and she’d get him a wife as she would a toy if Master cried for
it. Why are there no such things as lettres-de-cachet—and a Bastille
for young fellows of family?” The Major lived in such good company that
he might be excused for feeling like an Earl.—He kissed the widow’s
timid hand, pressed it in both his, and laid it down on the table with
one of his own over it, as he smiled and looked her in the face.

“Confess,” said he, “now, that you are thinking how you possibly can
make it up to your conscience to let the boy have his own way.”

She blushed and was moved in the usual manner of females. “I am
thinking that he is very unhappy—and I am too——”

“To contradict him or to let him have his own wish?” asked the other;
and added, with great comfort to his inward self, “I’m d——d if he
shall.”

“To think that he should have formed so foolish and cruel and fatal an
attachment,” the widow said, “which can but end in pain whatever be the
issue.”

“The issue shan’t be marriage, my dear sister,” the Major said
resolutely. “We’re not going to have a Pendennis, the head of the
house, marry a strolling mountebank from a booth. No, no, we won’t
marry into Greenwich Fair, ma’am.”

“If the match is broken suddenly off,” the widow interposed, “I don’t
know what may be the consequence. I know Arthur’s ardent temper, the
intensity of his affections, the agony of his pleasures and
disappointments, and I tremble at this one if it must be. Indeed,
indeed, it must not come on him too suddenly.”

“My dear madam,” the Major said, with an air of the deepest
commiseration “I’ve no doubt Arthur will have to suffer confoundedly
before he gets over the little disappointment. But is he, think you,
the only person who has been so rendered miserable?”

“No, indeed,” said Helen, holding down her eyes. She was thinking of
her own cas

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