George Meredith
The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Volume 8
He stood outside the Western gates, and as I approached, I could perceive a labour of excitement on his frame. He pulled violently at the bars of the obstruction.
'Richie, I am interdicted house and grounds!' he called, and waved his hand toward the lodge: 'they decline to open to me.'
'Were you denied admission?' I asked him.
'—Your name, if you please, sir?—Mr. Richmond Roy.—We are sorry we have orders not to admit you. And they declined; they would not admit me to see my son.'
'Those must be the squire's old orders,' I said, and shouted to the lodge-keeper.
My father, with the forethoughtfulness which never forsook him, stopped me.
'No, Richie, no; the good woman shall not have the responsibility of letting me in against orders; she may be risking her place, poor soul! Help me, dear lad.'
He climbed the bars to the spikes, tottering, and communicating a convulsion to me as I assisted him in the leap down: no common feat for one of his age and weight.
He leaned on me, quaking.
'Impossible! Richie, impossible!' he cried, and reviewed a series of interjections.
It was some time before I discovered that they related to the Will. He was frenzied, and raved, turning suddenly from red to pale under what I feared were redoubtable symptoms, physical or mental. He came for sight of the Will; he would contest it, overthrow it. Harry ruined? He would see Miss Beltham and fathom the plot;—angel, he called her, and was absurdly exclamatory, but in dire earnest. He must have had the appearance of a drunken man to persons observing him from the Grange windows.
My father was refused admission at the hall-doors.
The butler, the brute Sillabin, withstood me impassively.
Whose orders had he?
Miss Ilchester's.
'They are afraid of me!' my father thundered.
I sent a message to Janet.
She was not long in coming, followed by a footman who handed a twist of note-paper from my aunt Dorothy to my father. He opened it and made believe to read it, muttering all the while of the Will.
Janet dismissed the men-servants. She was quite colourless.
'We have been stopped in the doorway,' I said.
She answered: 'I wish it could have been prevented.'
'You take it on yourself, then?'
She was inaudible.
'My dear Janet, you call Riversley my home, don't you?'
'It is yours.'
'Do you intend to keep up this hateful feud now my grandfather is dead?'
'No, Harry, not I.'
'Did you give orders to stop my father from entering the house and grounds?'
'I did.'
'You won't have him here?'
'Dear Harry, I hoped he would not come just yet.'
'But you gave the orders?'
'Yes.'
'You're rather incomprehensible, my dear Janet.'
'I wish you could understand me, Harry.'
'You arm your servants against him!'
'In a few days—' she faltered.
'You insult him and me now,' said I, enraged at the half indication of her relenting, which spoiled her look of modestly—resolute beauty, and seemed to show that she meant to succumb without letting me break her. 'You are mistress of the place.'
'I am. I wish I were not.'
'You are mistress of Riversley, and you refuse to let my father come in!'
'While I am the mistress, yes.'
'Anywhere but here, Harry! If he will see me or aunty, if he will kindly appoint any other place, we will meet him, we shall be glad.'
'I request you to let him enter the house. Do you consent or not?'
'He was refused once at these doors. Do you refuse him a second time?'
'I do.'
'You mean that?'
'I am obliged to.'
'You won't yield a step to me?'
'I cannot.'
The spirit of an armed champion was behind those mild features, soft almost to supplication to me, that I might know her to be under a constraint. The nether lip dropped in breathing, the eyes wavered: such was her appearance in open war with me, but her will was firm.
Of course I was not so dense as to be unable to perceive her grounds for refusing.
She would not throw the burden on her grandada, even to propitiate me— the man she still loved.
But that she should have a reason, and think it good, in spite of me, and cling to it, defying me, and that she should do hurt to a sentient human creature, who was my father, for the sake of blindly obeying to the letter the injunction of the dead, were intolerable offences to me and common humanity. I, for my own part, would have forgiven her, as I congratulated myself upon reflecting. It was on her account—to open her mind, to enlighten her concerning right and wrong determination, to bring her feelings to bear upon a crude judgement—that I condescended to argue the case. Smarting with admiration, both of the depths and shallows of her character, and of her fine figure, I began:—She was to consider how young she was to pretend to decide on the balance of duties, how little of the world she had seen; an oath sworn at the bedside of the dead was a solemn thing, but was it Christian to keep it to do an unnecessary cruelty to the living? if she had not studied philosophy, she might at least discern the difference between just resolves and insane—between those the soul sanctioned, and those hateful to nature; to bind oneself to carry on another person's vindictiveness was voluntarily to adopt slavery; this was flatly-avowed insanity, and so forth, with an emphatic display of patience.
The truth of my words could not be controverted. Unhappily I confounded right speaking with right acting, and conceived, because I spoke so justly, that I was specially approved in pressing her to yield.
She broke the first pause to say, 'It's useless, Harry. I do what I think I am bound to do.'
'Then I have spoken to no purpose!'
'If you will only be kind, and wait two or three days?'
'Be sensible!'
'I am, as much as I can be.'
'Hard as a flint—you always were! The most grateful woman alive, I admit. I know not another, I assure you, Janet, who, in return for millions of money, would do such a piece of wanton cruelty. What! You think he was not punished enough when he was berated and torn to shreds in your presence? They would be cruel, perhaps—we will suppose it of your sex—but not so fond of their consciences as to stamp a life out to keep an oath. I forget the terms of the Will. Were you enjoined in it to force him away?'
My father had stationed himself in the background. Mention of the Will caught his ears, and he commenced shaking my aunt Dorothy's note, blinking and muttering at a great rate, and pressing his temples.
'I do not read a word of this,' he said,—'upon my honour, not a word; and I know it is her handwriting. That Will!—only, for the love of heaven, madam,'—he bowed vaguely to Janet 'not a syllable of this to the princess, or we are destroyed. I have a great bell in my head, or I would say more. Hearing is out of the question.'
Janet gazed piteously from him to me.
To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common.
I begged my father to walk along the carriage-drive. He required that the direction should be pointed out accurately, and promptly obeyed me, saying: 'I back you, remember. I should certainly be asleep now but for this extraordinary bell.' After going some steps, he turned to shout 'Gong,' and touched his ear. He walked loosely, utterly unlike the walk habitual to him even recently in Paris.
'Has he been ill?' Janet asked.
'He won't see the doctor; the symptoms threaten apoplexy or paralysis,
I 'm told. Let us finish. You were aware that you were to inherit
Riversley?'
'Yes, Riversley, Harry; I knew that; I knew nothing else.'
'The old place was left to you that you might bar my father out?'
'I gave my word.'
'You pledged it—swore?'
'No.'
'Well, you've done your worst, my dear. If the axe were to fall on your neck for it, you would still refuse, would you not?'
Janet answered softly: 'I believe so.'
'Then, good-bye,' said I.
That feminine softness and its burden of unalterable firmness pulled me two ways, angering me all the more that I should feel myself susceptible to a charm which came of spiritual rawness rather than sweetness; for she needed not to have made the answer in such a manner; there was pride in it; she liked the soft sound of her voice while declaring herself invincible: I could see her picturing herself meek but fixed.
'Will you go, Harry? Will you not take Riversley?' she said.
I laughed.
'To spare you the repetition of the dilemma?'
'No, Harry; but this might be done.'
'But—my fullest thanks to you for your generosity: really! I speak in earnest: it would be decidedly against your grandada's wishes, seeing that he left the Grange to you, and not to me.'
'Grandada's wishes! I cannot carry out all his wishes,' she sighed.
'Are you anxious to?'
We were on the delicate ground, as her crimson face revealed to me that she knew as well as I.
I, however, had little delicacy in leading her on it. She might well feel that she deserved some wooing.
I fancied she was going to be overcome, going to tremble and show herself ready to fall on my bosom, and I was uncertain of the amount of magnanimity in store there.
She replied calmly, 'Not immediately.'
'You are not immediately anxious to fulfil his wishes?'
'Harry, I find it hard to do those that are thrust on me.'
'But, as a matter of serious obligation, you would hold yourself bound by and by to perform them all?'
'I cannot speak any further of my willingness, Harry.'
'The sense of duty is evidently always sufficient to make you act upon the negative—to deny, at least?'
'Yes, I daresay,' said Janet.
We shook hands like a pair of commercial men.
I led my father to Bulsted. He was too feverish to remain there. In the evening, after having had a fruitless conversation with my aunt Dorothy upon the event of the day, I took him to London that he might visit his lawyers, who kindly consented to treat him like doctors, when I had arranged to make over to them three parts of my annuity, and talked of his Case encouragingly; the effect of which should not have astonished me. He closed a fit of reverie resembling his drowsiness, by exclaiming: 'Richie will be indebted to his dad for his place in the world after all!' Temporarily, he admitted, we must be fugitives from creditors, and as to that eccentric tribe, at once so human and so inhuman, he imparted many curious characteristics gained of his experience. Jorian DeWitt had indeed compared them to the female ivy that would ultimately kill its tree, but inasmuch as they were parasites, they loved their debtor; he was life and support to them, and there was this remarkable fact about them: by slipping out of their clutches at critical moments when they would infallibly be pulling you down, you were enabled to return to them fresh, and they became inspired with another lease of lively faith in your future: et caetera. I knew the language. It was a flash of himself, and a bad one, but I was not the person whom he meant to deceive with it. He was soon giving me other than verbal proof out of England that he was not thoroughly beaten. We had no home in England. At an hotel in Vienna, upon the close of the aristocratic season there, he renewed an acquaintance with a Russian lady, Countess Kornikoff, and he and I parted. She disliked the Margravine of Rippau, who was in Vienna, and did not recognize us. I heard that it was the Margravine who had despatched Prince Hermann to England as soon as she discovered Ottilia's flight thither. She commissioned him to go straightway to Roy in London, and my father's having infatuatedly left his own address for Prince Ernest's in the island, brought Hermann down: he only met Eckart in the morning train. I mention it to show the strange working of events.
Janet sent me a letter by the hands of Temple in August. It was moderately well written for so blunt a writer, and might have touched me but for other news coming simultaneously that shook the earth under my feet.
She begged my forgiveness for her hardness, adding characteristically that she could never have acted in any other manner. The delusion, that what she was she must always be, because it was her nature, had mastered her understanding, or rather it was one of the doors of her understanding not yet opened: she had to respect her grandada's wishes. She made it likewise appear that she was ready for further sacrifices to carry out the same.
'At least you will accept a division of the property, Harry. It should be yours. It is an excess, and I feel it a snare to me. I was a selfish child: I may not become an estimable woman. You have not pardoned my behaviour at the island last year, and I cannot think I was wrong: perhaps I might learn: I want your friendship and counsel. Aunty will live with me: she says that you would complete us. At any rate I transfer Riversley to you. Send me your consent. Papa will have it before the transfer is signed.'
The letter ended with an adieu, a petition for an answer, and ' yours affectionately.'
On the day of its date, a Viennese newspaper lying on the Salzburg Hotel table chronicled Ottilia's marriage with Prince Hermann.
I turned on Temple to walk him off his legs if I could.
Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest: learn to discover ungrudgingly that haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward. Would you know what it is to hope again, and have all your hopes at hand?—hang upon the crags at a gradient: that makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient: if just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. How the old lax life closes in about you there! You are the man of your faculties, nothing more. Why should a man pretend to more? We ask it wonderingly when we are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to the mountain kine.
CHAPTER LIV
MY RETURN TO ENGLAND
I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in love with the East, until it began to consume me. History, like the air we breathe, must be in motion to keep us uncorrupt: otherwise its ancient homes are infectious. My passion for the sun and his baked people lasted awhile, the drudgery of the habit of voluntary exile some time longer, and then, quite unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so violent that I abandoned a correspondence of several months, lying for me both at Damascus and Cairo, to catch the boat for Europe. A dream of a rainy morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have been the origin of the wild craving I had for my native land and Janet. The moist air of flying showers and drenched spring buds surrounded her; I saw her plainly lifting a rose's head; was it possible I had ever refused to be her yokefellow? Could so noble a figure of a fair young woman have been offered and repudiated again and again by a man in his senses? I spurned the intolerable idiot, to stop reflection. Perhaps she did likewise now. There was nothing to alarm me save my own eagerness.
The news of my father was perplexing, leading me to suppose him re-established in London, awaiting the coming on of his Case. Whence the money?
Money and my father, I knew, met as they divided, fortuitously; in illustration of which, I well remembered, while passing in view of the Key of the Adige along the Lombard plain, a circumstance during my Alpine tour with Temple, of more importance to him than to me, when my emulous friend, who would never be beaten, sprained his ankle severely on the crags of a waterfall, not far from Innsbruck, and was invited into a house by a young English lady, daughter of a retired Colonel of Engineers of our army. The colonel was an exile from his country for no grave crime: but, as he told us, as much an exile as if he had committed a capital offence in being the father of nine healthy girls. He had been, against his judgement, he averred, persuaded to fix on his Tyrolese spot of ground by the two elder ones. Five were now married to foreigners; thus they repaid him, by scattering good English blood on the race of Counts and Freiherrs! 'I could understand the decrees of Providence before I was a parent,' said this dear old Colonel Heddon. 'I was looking up at the rainbow when I heard your steps, asking myself whether it was seen in England at that instant, and why on earth I should be out of England!' He lived abroad to be able to dower his girls. His sons- in-law were gentlemen; so far he was condemned to be satisfied, but supposing all his girls married foreigners? His primitive frankness charmed us, and it struck me that my susceptible Temple would have liked to be in a position to reassure him with regard to the Lucy of the four. We were obliged to confess that she was catching a foreign accent. The old colonel groaned. He begged us to forgive him for not treating us as strangers; his heart leapt out to young English gentlemen.
My name, he said, reminded him of a great character at home, in the old days: a certain Roy-Richmond, son of an actress and somebody, so the story went: and there was an old Lord Edbury who knew more about it than most. 'Now Roy was an adventurer, but he had a soul of true chivalry, by gad, he had! Plenty of foreign whiffmajigs are to be found, but you won't come upon a fellow like that. Where he got his money from none knew: all I can say is, I don't believe he ever did a dirty action for it. And one matter I'll tell you of: pardon me a moment, Mr. Richmond, I haven't talked English for half a century, or, at least, a quarter. Old Lord Edbury put him down in his will for some thousands, and he risked it to save a lady, who hated him for his pains. Lady Edbury was of the Bolton blood, none of the tamest; they breed good cavalry men. She ran away from her husband once. The old lord took her back. "It 's at your peril, mind!" says she. Well, Roy hears by-and-by of afresh affair. He mounted horse; he was in the saddle, I've been assured, a night and a day, and posted himself between my lady's park-gates, and the house, at dusk. The rumour ran that he knew of the marquis playing spy on his wife. However, such was the fact; she was going off again, and the marquis did play the mean part. She walked down the parkroad, and, seeing the cloaked figure of a man, she imagined him to be her Lothario, and very naturally, you will own, fell into his arms. The gentleman in question was an acquaintance of mine; and the less you follow our example the better for you. It was a damnable period in morals! He told me that he saw the scene from the gates, where he had his carriage-and-four ready. The old lord burst out of an ambush on his wife and her supposed paramour; the lady was imprisoned in her rescuer's arms, and my friend retired on tiptoe, which was, I incline to think, the best thing he could do. Our morals were abominable. Lady Edbury would never see Roy- Richmond after that, nor the old lord neither. He doubled the sum he had intended to leave him, though. I heard that he married a second young wife. Roy, I believe, ended by marrying a great heiress, and reforming. He was an eloquent fellow, and stood like a general in full uniform, cocked hat and feathers; most amusing fellow at table; beat a Frenchman for anecdote.'
I spared Colonel Heddon the revelation of my relationship to his hero, thanking his garrulity for interrupting me.
How I pitied him when I drove past the gates of the main route to Innsbruck! For I was bound homeward: I should soon see England, green cloudy England, the white cliffs, the meadows, the heaths! And I thanked the colonel again in my heart for having done something to reconcile me to the idea of that strange father of mine.
A banner-like stream of morning-coloured smoke rolled North-eastward as I entered London, and I drove to Temple's chambers. He was in Court, engaged in a case as junior to his father. Temple had become that radiant human creature, a working man, then? I walked slowly to the Court, and saw him there, hardly recognising him in his wig. All that he had to do was to prompt his father in a case of collision at sea; the barque Priscilla had run foul of a merchant brig, near the mouth of the Thames, and though I did not expect it on hearing the vessel's name, it proved to be no other than the barque Priscilla of Captain Jasper Welsh. Soon after I had shaken Temple's hand, I was going through the same ceremony with the captain himself, not at all changed in appearance, who blessed his heart for seeing me, cried out that a beard and mustachios made a foreign face of a young Englishman, and was full of the 'providential' circumstance of his having confided his case to Temple and his father.
'Ay, ay, Captain Welsh,' said Temple, 'we have pulled you through, only another time mind you keep an eye on that look-out man of yours. Some of your men, I suspect, see double with an easy conscience. A close net makes slippery eels.'
'Have you anything to say against my men?' the captain inquired.
Temple replied that he would talk to him about it presently, and laughed as he drew me away.
'His men will get him into a deuce of a scrape some day, Richie. I shall put him on his guard. Have you had all my letters? You look made of iron. I'm beginning capitally, not afraid of the Court a bit, and I hope I'm not pert. I wish your father had taken it better!'
