George Meredith
Rhoda Fleming. Complete
CHAPTER XXIX
So long as the fool has his being in the world, he will be a part of every history, nor can I keep him from his place in a narrative that is made to revolve more or less upon its own wheels. Algernon went to bed, completely forgetting Edward and his own misfortunes, under the influence of the opiate of the order for one thousand pounds, to be delivered to him upon application. The morning found him calmly cheerful, until a little parcel was brought to his door, together with a note from Mrs. Lovell, explaining that the parcel contained those jewels, his precious gifts of what she had insultingly chosen to call “esteem” for her.
Algernon took it in his hand, and thought of flinging it through the window; but as the window happened to be open, he checked the impulse, and sent it with great force into a corner of the room: a perfectly fool-like proceeding, for the fool is, after his fashion, prudent, and will never, if he can help it, do himself thorough damage, that he may learn by it and be wiser.
“I never stand insult,” he uttered, self-approvingly, and felt manlier. “No; not even from you, ma’am,” he apostrophized Mrs. Lovell’s portrait, that had no rival now upon the wall, and that gave him a sharp fight for the preservation of his anger, so bewitching she was to see. Her not sending up word that she wished him to come to her rendered his battle easier.
“It looks rather like a break between us,” he said. “If so, you won’t find me so obedient to your caprices, Mrs. Margaret L.; though you are a pretty woman, and know it. Smile away. I prefer a staunch, true sort of a woman, after all. And the colonies it must be, I begin to suspect.” This set him conjuring before his eyes the image of Rhoda, until he cried, “I’ll be hanged if the girl doesn’t haunt me!” and considered the matter with some curiosity.
He was quickly away, and across the square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the attorney’s firm, where apparently his coming was expected, and he was told that the money would be placed in his hands on the following day. He then communicated with Edward, in the brief Caesarian tongue of the telegraph: “All right. Stay. Ceremony arranged.” After which, he hailed a skimming cab, and pronouncing the word “Epsom,” sank back in it, and felt in his breast-pocket for his cigar-case, without casting one glance of interest at the deep fit of cogitation the cabman had been thrown into by the suddenness of the order.
“Dash’d if it ain’t the very thing I went and gone and dreamed last night,” said the cabman, as he made his dispositions to commence the journey.
Certain boys advised him to whip it away as hard as he could, and he would come in the winner.
“Where shall I grub, sir?” the cabman asked through the little door above, to get some knowledge of the quality of his fare.
“Eat your ‘grub’ on the course,” said Algernon.
“Ne’er a hamper to take up nowheres, is there, sir?”
“Do you like the sight of one?”
“Well, it ain’t what I object to.”
“Then go fast, my man, and you will soon see plenty.”
“If you took to chaffin’ a bit later in the day, it’d impart more confidence to my bosom,” said the cabman; but this he said to that bosom alone.
“Ain’t no particular colours you’d like me to wear, is there? I’ll get a rosette, if you like, sir, and enter in triumph. Gives ye something to stand by. That’s always my remark, founded on observation.”
“Go to the deuce! Drive on,” Algernon sang out. “Red, yellow, and green.”
“Lobster, ale, and salad!” said the cabman, flicking his whip; “and good colours too. Tenpenny Nail’s the horse. He’s the colours I stick to.” And off he drove, envied of London urchins, as mortals would have envied a charioteer driving visibly for Olympus.
Algernon crossed his arms, with the frown of one looking all inward.
At school this youth had hated sums. All arithmetical difficulties had confused and sickened him. But now he worked with indefatigable industry on an imaginary slate; put his postulate, counted probabilities, allowed for chances, added, deducted, multiplied, and unknowingly performed algebraic feats, till his brows were stiff with frowning, and his brain craved for stimulant.
This necessity sent his hand to his purse, for the calling of the cab had not been a premeditated matter. He discovered therein some half-crowns and a sixpence, the latter of which he tossed in contempt at some boys who were cheering the vehicles on their gallant career.
There was something desperately amusing to him in the thought that he had not even money enough to pay the cabman, or provide for a repast. He rollicked in his present poverty. Yesterday he had run down with a party of young guardsmen in a very royal manner; and yesterday he had lost. To-day he journeyed to the course poorer than many of the beggars he would find there; and by a natural deduction, to-day he was to win.
He whistled mad waltzes to the measure of the wheels. He believed that he had a star. He pitched his half-crowns to the turnpike-men, and sought to propitiate Fortune by displaying a signal indifference to small change; in which method of courting her he was perfectly serious. He absolutely rejected coppers. They “crossed his luck.” Nor can we say that he is not an authority on this point: the Goddess certainly does not deal in coppers.
Anxious efforts at recollection perplexed him. He could not remember whether he had “turned his money” on looking at the last new moon. When had he seen the last new moon, and where? A cloud obscured it; he had forgotten. He consoled himself by cursing superstition. Tenpenny Nail was to gain the day in spite of fortune. Algernon said this, and entrenched his fluttering spirit behind common sense, but he found it a cold corner. The longing for Champagne stimulant increased in fervour. Arithmetic languished.
As he was going up the hill, the wheels were still for a moment, and hearing “Tenpenny Nail” shouted, he put forth his head, and asked what the cry was, concerning that horse.
“Gone lame,” was the answer.
It hit the centre of his nerves, without reaching his comprehension, and all Englishmen being equal on Epsom Downs, his stare at the man who had spoken, and his sickly colour, exposed him to pungent remarks.
“Hullos! here’s another Ninepenny—a penny short!” and similar specimens of Epsom wit, encouraged by the winks and retorts of his driver, surrounded him; but it was empty clamour outside. A rage of emotions drowned every idea in his head, and when he got one clear from the mass, it took the form of a bitter sneer at Providence, for cutting off his last chance of reforming his conduct and becoming good. What would he not have accomplished, that was brilliant, and beautiful, and soothing, but for this dead set against him!
It was clear that Providence cared “not a rap,” whether he won or lost—was good or bad. One might just as well be a heathen; why not?
He jumped out of the cab (tearing his coat in the acts minor evil, but “all of a piece,” as he said), and made his way to the Ring. The bee-swarm was thick as ever on the golden bough. Algernon heard no curses, and began to nourish hope again, as he advanced. He began to hope wildly that this rumour about the horse was a falsity, for there was no commotion, no one declaiming.
He pushed to enter the roaring circle, which the demand for an entrance-fee warned him was a privilege, and he stammered, and forgot the gentlemanly coolness commonly distinguishing him, under one of the acuter twinges of his veteran complaint of impecuniosity. And then the cabman made himself heard: a civil cabman, but without directions, and uncertain of his dinner and his pay, tolerably hot, also, from threading a crowd after a deaf gentleman. His half-injured look restored to Algernon his self-possession.
“Ah! there you are:—scurry away and fetch my purse out of the bottom of the cab. I’ve dropped it.”
On this errand, the confiding cabman retired. Holding to a gentleman’s purse is even securer than holding to a gentleman.
While Algernon was working his forefinger in his waistcoat-pocket reflectively, a man at his elbow said, with a show of familiar deference,—
“If it’s any convenience to you, sir,” and showed the rim of a gold piece ‘twixt finger and thumb.
“All right,” Algernon replied readily, and felt that he was known, but tried to keep his eyes from looking at the man’s face; which was a vain effort. He took the money, nodded curtly, and passed in.
Once through the barrier, he had no time to be ashamed. He was in the atmosphere of challenges. He heard voices, and saw men whom not to challenge, or try a result with, was to acknowledge oneself mean, and to abandon the manliness of life. Algernon’s betting-book was soon out and in operation. While thus engaged, he beheld faces passing and repassing that were the promise of luncheon and a loan; and so comfortable was the assurance thereof to him, that he laid the thought of it aside, quite in the background, and went on betting with an easy mind.
Small, senseless bets, they merely occupied him; and winning them was really less satisfactory than losing, which, at all events, had the merit of adding to the bulk of his accusation against the ruling Powers unseen.
Algernon was too savage for betting when the great race was run. He refused both at taunts and cajoleries; but Lord Suckling coming by, said “Name your horse,” and, caught unawares, Algernon named Little John, one of the ruck, at a hazard. Lord Suckling gave him fair odds, asking: “In tens?—fifties?”
“Silver,” shrugged Algernon, implacable toward Fortune; and the kindly young nobleman nodded, and made allowance for his ill-temper and want of spirit, knowing the stake he had laid on the favourite.
Little John startled the field by coming in first at a canter.
“Men have committed suicide for less than this” said Algernon within his lips, and a modest expression of submission to fate settled on his countenance. He stuck to the Ring till he was haggard with fatigue. His whole nature cried out for Champagne, and now he burst away from that devilish circle, looking about for Lord Suckling and a hamper. Food and a frothing drink were all that he asked from Fortune. It seemed to him that the concourse on the downs shifted in a restless way.
“What’s doing, I wonder?” he thought aloud.
“Why, sir, the last race ain’t generally fashionable,” said his cabman, appearing from behind his shoulder. “Don’t you happen to be peckish, sir?—‘cause, luck or no luck, that’s my case. I couldn’t see, your purse, nowheres.”
“Confound you! how you hang about me! What do you want?” Algernon cried; and answered his own question, by speeding the cabman to a booth with what money remained to him, and appointing a place of meeting for the return. After which he glanced round furtively to make sure that he was not in view of the man who had lent him the sovereign. It became evident that the Downs were flowing back to London.
He hurried along the lines of carriages, all getting into motion. The ghastly conviction overtook him that he was left friendless, to starve. Wherever he turned, he saw strangers and empty hampers, bottles, straw, waste paper—the ruins of the feast: Fate’s irony meantime besetting him with beggars, who swallowed his imprecations as the earnest of coming charity in such places.
At last, he was brought almost to sigh that he might see the man who had lent him the sovereign, and his wish was hardly formed, when Nicodemus Sedgett approached, waving a hat encircled by preposterous wooden figures, a trifle less lightly attired than the ladies of the ballet, and as bold in the matter of leg as the female fashion of the period.
Algernon eyed the lumpy-headed, heavy-browed rascal with what disgust he had left in him, for one who came as an instrument of the Fates to help him to some poor refreshment. Sedgett informed him that he had never had such fun in his life.
“Just ‘fore matrimony,” he communicated in a dull whisper, “a fellow ought to see a bit o’ the world, I says—don’t you, sir? and this has been rare sport, that it has! Did ye find your purse, sir? Never mind ‘bout that ther’ pound. I’ll lend you another, if ye like. How sh’ll it be? Say the word.”
Algernon was meditating, apparently on a remote subject. He nodded sharply.
“Yes. Call at my chambers to-morrow.”
Another sovereign was transferred to him: but Sedgett would not be shaken off.
“I just wanted t’ have a bit of a talk with you,” he spoke low.
“Hang it! I haven’t eaten all day,” snapped the irritable young gentleman, fearful now of being seen in the rascal’s company.
“You come along to the jolliest booth—I’ll show it to you,” said Sedgett, and lifted one leg in dancing attitude. “Come along, sir: the jolliest booth I ever was in, dang me if it ain’t! Ale and music—them’s my darlings!” the wretch vented his slang. “And I must have a talk with you. I’ll stick to you. I’m social when I’m jolly, that I be: and I don’t know a chap on these here downs. Here’s the pint: Is all square? Am I t’ have the cash in cash counted down, I asks? And is it to be before, or is it to be after, the ceremony? There! bang out! say, yes or no.”
Algernon sent him to perdition with infinite heartiness, but he was dry, dispirited, and weak, and he walked on, Sedgett accompanying him. He entered a booth, and partook of ale and ham, feeling that he was in the dregs of calamity. Though the ale did some service in reviving, it did not cheer him, and he had a fit of moral objection to Sedgett’s discourse.
Sedgett took his bluntness as a matter to be endured for the honour of hob-a-nobbing with a gentleman. Several times he recurred to the theme which he wanted, as he said, to have a talk upon.
He related how he had courted the young woman, “bashful-like,” and had been so; for she was a splendid young woman; not so handsome now, as she used to be when he had seen her in the winter: but her illness had pulled her down and made her humble: they had cut her hair during the fever, which had taken her pride clean out of her; and when he had put the question to her on the evening of last Sunday, she had gone into a sort of faint, and he walked away with her affirmative locked up in his breast-pocket, and was resolved always to treat her well—which he swore to.
“Married, and got the money, and the lease o’ my farm disposed of, I’m off to Australia and leave old England behind me, and thank ye, mother, thank ye! and we shan’t meet again in a hurry. And what sort o’ song I’m to sing for ‘England is my nation, ain’t come across me yet. Australia’s such a precious big world; but that’ll come easy in time. And there’ll I farm, and damn all you gentlemen, if you come anigh me.”
The eyes of the fellow were fierce as he uttered this; they were rendered fierce by a peculiar blackish flush that came on his brows and cheek-bones; otherwise, the yellow about the little brown dot in the centre of the eyeball had not changed; but the look was unmistakably savage, animal, and bad. He closed the lids on them, and gave a sort of churlish smile immediately afterward.
“Harmony’s the game. You act fair, I act fair. I’ve kept to the condition. She don’t know anything of my whereabouts—res’dence, I mean; and thinks I met you in her room for the first time. That’s the truth, Mr. Blancove. And thinks me a sheepish chap, and I’m that, when I’m along wi’ her. She can’t make out how I come to call at her house and know her first. Gives up guessing, I suppose, for she’s quiet about it; and I pitch her tales about Australia, and life out there. I’ve got her to smile, once or twice. She’ll turn her hand to making cheeses, never you fear. Only, this I say. I must have the money. It’s a thousand and a bargain. No thousand, and no wife for me. Not that I don’t stand by the agreement. I’m solid.”
Algernon had no power of encountering a human eye steadily, or he would have shown the man with a look how repulsive he was to a gentleman. His sensations grew remorseful, as if he were guilty of handing a victim to the wretch.
But the woman followed her own inclination, did she not? There was no compulsion: she accepted this man. And if she could do that, pity was wasted on her!
So thought he: and so the world would think of the poor forlorn soul striving to expiate her fault, that her father and sister might be at peace, without shame.
Algernon signified to Sedgett that the agreement was fixed and irrevocable on his part.
Sedgett gulped some ale.
“Hands on it,” he said, and laid his huge hand open across the table.
This was too much.
“My word must satisfy you,” said Algernon, rising.
“So it shall. So it do,” returned Sedgett, rising with him. “Will you give it in writing?”
“I won’t.”
“That’s blunt. Will you come and have a look at a sparring-match in yond’ brown booth, sir?”
“I am going back to London.”
“London and the theayter that’s the fun, now, ain’t it!” Sedgett laughed.
Algernon discerned his cabman and the conveyance ready, and beckoned him.
“Perhaps, sir,” said Sedgett, “if I might make so bold—I don’t want to speak o’ them sovereigns—but I’ve got to get back too, and cash is run low. D’ ye mind, sir? Are you kind-hearted?”
A constitutional habit of servility to his creditor when present before him signalized Algernon. He detested the man, but his feebleness was seized by the latter question, and he fancied he might, on the road to London, convey to Sedgett’s mind that it would be well to split that thousand, as he had previously devised.
“Jump in,” he said.
When Sedgett was seated, Algernon would have been glad to walk the distance to London to escape from the unwholesome proximity. He took the vacant place, in horror of it. The man had hitherto appeared respectful; and in Dahlia’s presence he had seemed a gentle big fellow with a reverent, affectionate heart. Sedgett rallied him.
“You’ve had bad luck—that’s wrote on your hatband. Now, if you was a woman, I’d say, tak’ and go and have a peroose o’ your Bible. That’s what my young woman does; and by George! it’s just like medicine to her—that ‘tis! I’ve read out to her till I could ha’ swallowed two quart o’ beer at a gulp—I was that mortal thirsty. It don’t somehow seem to improve men. It didn’t do me no good. There was I, cursin’ at the bother, down in my boots, like, and she with her hands in a knot, staring the fire out o’ count’nance. They’re weak, poor sort o’ things.”
The intolerable talk of the ruffian prompted Algernon to cry out, for relief,—
“A scoundrel like you must be past any good to be got from reading his Bible.”
Sedgett turned his dull brown eyes on him, the thick and hateful flush of evil blood informing them with detestable malignity.
“Come; you be civil, if you’re going to be my companion,” he said. “I don’t like bad words; they don’t go down my windpipe. ‘Scoundrel ‘s a name I’ve got a retort for, and if it hadn’t been you, and you a gentleman, you’d have had it spanking hot from the end o’ my fist. Perhaps you don’t know what sort of a arm I’ve got? Just you feel that ther’ muscle.”
He doubled his arm, the knuckles of the fist toward Algernon’s face.
“Down with it, you dog!” cried Algernon, crushing his hat as he started up.
“It’ll come on your nose, if I downs with it, my lord,” said Sedgett. “You’ve what they Londoners calls ‘bonneted yourself.’”
He pulled Algernon by the coat-tail into his seat.
“Stop!” Algernon shouted to the cabman.
“Drive ahead!” roared Sedgett.
This signal of a dissension was heard along the main street of Epsom, and re-awakened the flagging hilarity of the road.
Algernon shrieked his commands; Sedgett thundered his. They tussled, and each having inflicted an unpleasant squeeze on the other, they came apart by mutual consent, and exchanged half-length blows. Overhead, the cabman—not merely a cabman, but an individual—flicked the flanks of his horse, and cocked his eye and head in answer to gesticulations from shop-doors and pavement.
“Let ‘em fight it out, I’m impartial,” he remarked; and having lifted his little observing door, and given one glance, parrot-wise, below, he shut away the troubled prospect of those mortals, and drove along benignly.
Epsom permitted it; but Ewell contained a sturdy citizen, who, smoking his pipe under his eaves, contemplative of passers-by, saw strife rushing on like a meteor. He raised the waxed end of his pipe, and with an authoritative motion of his head at the same time, pointed out the case to a man in a donkey-cart, who looked behind, saw pugnacity upon wheels, and manoeuvred a docile and wonderfully pretty-stepping little donkey in such a manner that the cabman was fain to pull up.
The combatants jumped into the road.
“That’s right, gentlemen; I don’t want to spile sport,” said the donkey’s man. “O’ course you ends your Epsom-day with spirit.”
“There’s sunset on their faces,” said the cabman. “Would you try a by-lane, gentlemen?”
But now the donkey’s man had inspected the figures of the antagonistic couple.
“Taint fair play,” he said to Sedgett. “You leave that gentleman alone, you, sir?”
The man with the pipe came up.
“No fighting,” he observed. “We ain’t going to have our roads disgraced. It shan’t be said Englishmen don’t know how to enjoy themselves without getting drunk and disorderly. You drop your fists.”
The separation had to be accomplished by violence, for Algernon’s blood was up.
A crowd was not long in collecting, which caused a stoppage of vehicles of every description.
A gentleman leaned from an open carriage to look at the fray critically, and his companion stretching his neck to do likewise, “Sedgett!” burst from his lips involuntarily.
The pair of original disputants (for there were many by this time) turned their heads simultaneously toward the carriage.
“Will you come on?” Sedgett roared, but whether to Algernon, or to one of the gentlemen, or one of the crowd, was indefinite. None responding, he shook with ox-like wrath, pushed among shoulders, and plunged back to his seat, making the cabman above bound and sway, and the cab-horse to start and antic.
Greatly to the amazement of the spectators, the manifest gentleman (by comparison) who had recently been at a pummelling match with him, and bore the stains of it, hung his head, stepped on the cab, and suffered himself to be driven away.
“Sort of a ‘man-and-wife’ quarrel,” was the donkey’s man’s comment. “There’s something as corks ‘em up, and something uncorks ‘em; but what that something is, I ain’t, nor you ain’t, man enough to inform the company.”
He rubbed his little donkey’s nose affectionately.
“Any gentleman open to a bet I don’t overtake that ere Hansom within three miles o’ Ewell?” he asked, as he took the rein.
But his little donkey’s quality was famous in the neighbourhood.
“Come on, then,” he said; “and show what you can do, without emilation, Master Tom.”
Away the little donkey trotted.
