I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR
Though I had not previously seen a postillion in my life, I gazed on
the pair bobbing regularly on their horses before me, without a thought
upon the marvel of their sudden apparition and connection with my
fortunes. I could not tire of hearing the pleasant music of the many
feet at the trot, and tried to explain to my father that the men going
up and down made it like a piano that played of itself. He laughed and
kissed me; he remembered having once shown me the inside of a piano
when the keys were knocked. My love for him as we drove into London had
a recognized footing: I perceived that he was my best friend and only
true companion, besides his being my hero. The wicked men who had
parted us were no longer able to do harm, he said. I forgot, in my
gladness at their defeat, to ask what had become of Shylock's
descendant.
Mrs. Waddy welcomed us when we alighted. Do not imagine that it was at
the door of her old house. It was in a wide street opening on a
splendid square, and pillars were before the houses, and inside there
was the enchantment of a little fountain playing thin as whipcord,
among ferns, in a rock-basin under a window that glowed with kings of
England, copied from boys' history books. All the servants were drawn
up in the hall to do homage to me. They seemed less real and living
than the wonder of the sweet-smelling chairs, the birds, and the
elegant dogs. Richest of treats, a monkey was introduced to me. 'It's
your papa's whim,' Mrs. Waddy said, resignedly; 'he says he must have
his jester. Indeed it is no joke to me.'
Yet she smiled happily, though her voice was melancholy. From her I now
learnt that my name was Richmond Roy, and not Harry Richmond. I said,
'Very well,' for I was used to change. Everybody in the house wore a
happy expression of countenance, except the monkey, who was too busy.
As we mounted the stairs I saw more kings of England painted on the
back-windows. Mrs. Waddy said: 'It is considered to give a monarchical
effect,'—she coughed modestly after the long word, and pursued: 'as it
should.' I insisted upon going to the top floor, where I expected to
find William the Conqueror, and found him; but that strong connecting
link between John Thresher and me presented himself only to carry my
recollections of the Dipwell of yesterday as far back into the past as
the old Norman days.
'And down go all the kings, downstairs,' I said, surveying them
consecutively.
'Yes,' she replied, in a tone that might lead one to think it their
lamentable fate. 'And did the people look at you as you drove along
through the streets, Master Richmond?'
I said 'Yes,' in turn; and then we left off answering, but questioned
one another, which is a quicker way of getting at facts; I know it is
with boys and women. Mrs. Waddy cared much less to hear of Dipwell and
its inhabitants than of the sensation created everywhere by our
equipage. I noticed that when her voice was not melancholy her face
was. She showed me a beautiful little pink bed, having a crown over it,
in a room opening to my father's. Twenty thousand magnificent dreams
seemed to flash their golden doors when I knew that the bed was mine. I
thought it almost as nice as a place by my father's side.
'Don't you like it, Mrs. Waddy?' I said.
She smiled and sighed. 'Like it? Oh! yes, my dear, to be sure I do. I
only hope it won't vanish.' She simpered and looked sad.
I had too many distractions, or I should have asked her whether my
amazing and delightful new home had ever shown symptoms of vanishing;
it appeared to me, judging from my experience, that nothing moved
violently except myself, and my principal concern was lest any one
should carry me away at a moment's notice. In the evening I was
introduced to a company of gentlemen, who were drinking wine after
dinner with my father. They clapped their hands and laughed
immoderately on my telling them that I thought those kings of England
who could not find room on the windows must have gone down to the
cellars.
'They are going,' my father said. He drank off a glassful of wine and
sighed prodigiously. 'They are going, gentlemen, going there, like good
wine, like old Port, which they tell us is going also. Favour me by
drinking to the health of Richmond Roy the younger.'
They drank to me heartily, but my father had fallen mournful before I
left the room.
Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French
from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed to
be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and
lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a
fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take
down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my
mornings. My father told the man who instructed me in the art of
self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession. I
wrestled ten minutes every day with this man's son, and was regularly
thrown. On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in
the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and
was much looked at. 'It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and
persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,' he said.
We used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and
the House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay
of British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William
Pitt (our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and
Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.
My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage. 'Now I
have you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,' he said. I
wished to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some
other place. He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth
would do it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth
in perfect trust. We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul's and
Westminster Abbey as of a day that had its charm. Our pew among a
fashionable congregation pleased him better. The pew-opener curtseyed
to none as she did to him. For my part, I missed the monuments and the
chants, and something besides that had gone—I knew not what. At the
first indication of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after
making me stand with my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like
a dragon in a piece of tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and
try to be the same that he had been in Mrs. Waddy's lodgings. Then we
read the Arabian Nights together, or, rather, he read them to me, often
acting out the incidents as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to
perform a duty was the fatal forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the
cream-tarts; if my father subjected me to an interrogation concerning
my lessons, he was the dread African magician to whom must be
surrendered my acquisition of the ring and the musty old lamp. We were
quite in the habit of meeting fair Persians. He would frequently
ejaculate that he resembled the Three Calendars in more respects than
one. To divert me during my recovery from measles, he one day hired an
actor in a theatre, and put a cloth round his neck, and seated him in a
chair, rubbed his chin with soap, and played the part of the Barber
over him, and I have never laughed so much in my life. Poor Mrs. Waddy
got her hands at her sides, and kept on gasping, 'Oh, sir! oh!' while
the Barber hurried away from the half-shaved young man to consult his
pretended astrolabe in the next room, where we heard him shouting the
sun's altitude, and consulting its willingness for the impatient young
man to be further shaved; and back he came, seeming refreshed to have
learnt the sun's favourable opinion, and gabbling at an immense rate,
full of barber's business. The servants were allowed to be spectators;
but as soon as the young man was shaved, my father dismissed them with
the tone of a master. No wonder they loved him. Mrs. Waddy asked who
could help it?
I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of
marrying again; it added a curious romantic tenderness to my adoration
of him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world. To have
his hand in mine was my delight. Then it was that I could think
earnestly of Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I
would not have minded his marrying. My favourite dream was to see him
shooting an arrow in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because
of not finding his arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to,
and wandering after it till he passed out of green fields to grassy
rocks, and to a stony desert, where at last he found his arrow at an
enormous distance from the shooting line, and there was the desert all
about him, and the sweetest fairy ever imagined going to show herself
to him in the ground under his feet. In his absence I really hungered
for him, and was jealous.
During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the
Continent, where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple;
and my father directed our movements through the aid of a telescope,
which told us the titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the
cities and cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and
the castles—they were little more to me than an animated book of
geography, opening and shutting at random; and travelling from place to
place must have seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I
was generally as quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace
between any two emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young
lady. My father made friends fast on our travels: her parents were
among the number, and she fell in love with me and enjoyed having the
name of Peribanou, which I bestowed on her for her delicious talk of
the blue and red-striped posts that would spout up fountains of pearls
if they were plucked from their beds, and the palaces that had flown
out of the farthest corners of the world, and the city that would some
night or other vanish suddenly, leaving bare sea-ripple to say 'Where?
where?' as they rolled over. I would have seen her marry my father
happily. She was like rest and dreams to me, soft sea and pearls. We
entered into an arrangement to correspond for life. Her name was Clara
Goodwin; she requested me to go always to the Horse Guards to discover
in what part of the world Colonel Goodwin might be serving when I
wanted to write to her. I, in return, could give no permanent address,
so I related my history from the beginning. 'To write to you would be
the same as writing to a river,' she said; and insisted that I should
drop the odious name of Roy when I grew a man. My father quarrelled
with Colonel Goodwin. Months after I felt as if I had only just been
torn from Clara, but she stood in a mist, irrecoverably distant. I had
no other friend.
Twelve dozen of splendid Burgundy were the fruit of our tour, to be
laid down at Dipwell farm for my arrival at my majority, when I should
be a legal man, embarked in my own ship, as my father said. I did not
taste the wine. 'Porter for me that day, please God!' cried Mrs. Waddy,
who did. My father eyed her with pity, and ordered her to send the wine
down to Dipwell, which was done. He took me between his knees, and said
impressively, 'Now, Richie, twelve dozen of the best that man can drink
await you at the gates of manhood. Few fathers can say that to their
sons, my boy! If we drink it together, blessings on the day! If I'm
gone, Richie, shut up in the long box,' his voice shook, and he added,
'gone to Peribanou underneath, you know, remember that your dada saw
that the wine was a good vintage, and bought it and had it bottled in
his own presence while you were asleep in the Emperor's room in the
fine old Burgundy city, and swore that, whatever came to them both, his
son should drink the wine of princes on the day of his majority.' Here
my father's tone was highly exalted, and he sat in a great flush.
I promised him I would bend my steps toward Dipwell to be there on my
twenty-first birthday, and he pledged himself to be there in spirit at
least, bodily if possible. We sealed the subject with some tears. He
often talked of commissioning a poet to compose verses about that
wonderful coming day at Dipwell. The thought of the day in store for us
sent me strutting as though I had been in the presence of my
drill-master. Mrs. Waddy, however, grew extremely melancholy at the
mention of it.
'Lord only knows where we shall all be by that time!' she sighed.
'She is a dewy woman,' said my father, disdainfully They appeared
always to be at variance, notwithstanding her absolute devotion to him.
My father threatened to have her married to somebody immediately if she
afflicted him with what he called her Waddyism. She had got the habit
of exclaiming at the end of her remarks, 'No matter; our clock strikes
soon!' in a way that communicated to me an obscure idea of a door going
to open unexpectedly in one of the walls, and conduct us, by
subterranean passages, into a new country. My father's method of
rebuking her anxious nature was to summon his cook, the funniest of
Frenchmen, Monsieur Alphonse, and issue orders for a succession of six
dinner-parties. 'And now, ma'am, you have occupation for your mind,' he
would say.
To judge by the instantaneous composure of her whole appearance, he did
produce a temporary abatement of her malady. The good soul bustled out
of the room in attendance upon M. Alphonse, and never complained while
the dinners lasted, but it was whispered that she had fits in the upper
part of the house. No sooner did my father hear the rumour than he
accused her to her face of this enormity, telling her that he was
determined to effect a permanent cure, even though she should drive him
to unlimited expense. We had a Ball party and an Aladdin supper, and
for a fortnight my father hired postillions; we flashed through London.
My father backed a horse to run in the races on Epsom Downs named
Prince Royal, only for the reason that his name was Prince Royal, and
the horse won, which was, he said, a proof to me that in our country it
was common prudence to stick to Royalty; and he bade me note that if he
went in a carriage and two, he was comparatively unnoticed, whereas
when he was beheld in a carriage and four, with postillions, at a
glance from him the country people tugged their forelocks, and would
like, if he would let them, to kiss his hand. 'We will try the scarlet
livery on one of our drives, Richie,' said he. Mrs. Waddy heard him.
'It is unlawful, sir,' she said. 'For whom, ma'am?' asked my father.
'None but Royal...' she was explaining, but stopped, for he showed her
an awful frown, and she cried so that my heart ached for her. My father
went out to order the livery on the spot. He was very excited. Then it
was that Mrs. Waddy, embracing me, said, 'My dear, my own Master
Richmond, my little Harry, prepare your poor child's heart for evil
days.' I construed her unintelligible speech as an attack upon my
father, and abused her violently.
While I was in this state of wrathful championship, the hall-door was
opened. I ran out and caught sight of my aunt Dorothy, in company with
old Mr. Bannerbridge. I was kissed and hugged for I know not how long,
until the smell of Riversley took entire possession of me, and my old
home seemed nearer than the one I lived in; but my aunt, seeing tears
on my cheeks, asked me what was my cause of sorrow. In a moment I
poured out a flood of complaints against Mrs. Waddy for vexing my
father. When she heard of the scarlet livery, my aunt lifted her hands.
'The man is near the end of his wits and his money together,' said Mr.
Bannerbridge; and she said to me, 'My darling Harry will come back to
his own nice little room, and see his grandpapa soon, won't you, my
pet? All is ready for him there as it used to be, except poor mama.
“Kiss my boy, my Harry—Harry Richmond.” Those were her last words on
her death-bed, before she went to God, Harry, my own! There is Sampson
the pony, and Harry's dog Prince, and his lamb Daisy, grown a sheep,
and the ploughboy, Dick, with the big boots.' Much more sweet talk of
the same current that made my face cloudy and bright, and filled me
with desire for Riversley, to see my mother's grave and my friends.
Aunt Dorothy looked at me. 'Come now,' she said; 'come with me, Harry.'
Her trembling seized on me like a fire. I said, 'Yes,' though my heart
sank as if I had lost my father with the word. She caught me in her
arms tight, murmuring, 'And dry our tears and make our house laugh. Oh!
since the night that Harry went..... And I am now Harry's mama, he has
me.'
I looked on her forehead for the wreath of white flowers my mother used
to wear, and thought of my father's letter with the prayer written on
the black-bordered page. I said I would go, but my joy in going was
gone. We were stopped in the doorway by Mrs. Waddy. Nothing would tempt
her to surrender me. Mr. Bannerbridge tried reasoning with her, and, as
he said, put the case, which seemed to have perched on his forefinger.
He talked of my prospects, of my sole chance of being educated morally
and virtuously as became the grandson of an English gentleman of a good
old family, and of my father having spent my mother's estate, and of
the danger of his doing so with mine, and of religious duty and the
awfulness of the position Mrs. Waddy stood in. He certainly subdued me
to very silent breathing, but did not affect me as my aunt Dorothy's
picturing of Riversley had done; and when Mrs. Waddy, reduced to an
apparent submissiveness, addressed me piteously, 'Master Richmond,
would you leave papa?' I cried out, 'No, no, never leave my papa,' and
twisted away from my aunt's keeping. My father's arrival caused me to
be withdrawn, but I heard his offer of his hospitality and all that was
his; and subsequently there was loud talking on his part. I was kissed
by my aunt before she went. She whispered, 'Come to us when you are
free; think of us when you pray.' She was full of tears. Mr.
Bannerbridge patted my head.
The door closed on them and I thought it was a vision that had passed.
But now my father set my heart panting with questions as to the
terrible possibility of us two ever being separated. In some way he
painted my grandfather so black that I declared earnestly I would
rather die than go to Riversley; I would never utter the name of the
place where there was evil speaking of the one I loved dearest. 'Do
not, my son,' he said solemnly, 'or it parts us two.' I repeated after
him, 'I am a Roy and not a Beltham.' It was enough to hear that insult
and shame had been cast on him at Riversley for me to hate the name of
the place. We cried and then laughed together, and I must have
delivered myself with amazing eloquence, for my father held me at arms'
length and said, 'Richie, the notion of training you for a General
commandership of the British army is a good one, but if you have got
the winning tongue, the woolsack will do as well for a whisper in the
ear of the throne. That is our aim, my son. We say,—you will not
acknowledge our birth, you shall acknowledge our worth.' He complained
bitterly of my aunt Dorothy bringing a lawyer to our house. The sins of
Mrs. Waddy were forgiven her, owing to her noble resistance to the
legal gentleman's seductive speech. So I walked up and down stairs with
the kings of England looking at me out of the coloured windows quietly
for a week; and then two ugly men entered the house, causing me to
suffer a fearful oppression, though my father was exceedingly kind to
them and had beds provided for them, saying that they were very old
retainers of his.
But the next day our scarlet livery appeared. After exacting particular
attention to his commands, my father quitted Mrs. Waddy, and we mounted
the carriage, laughing at her deplorable eyes and prim lips, which he
imitated for my amusement. 'A load is off my head,' he remarked. He
asked me if splendour did not fatigue me also. I caught the answer from
his face and replied that it did, and that I should like to go right on
to Dipwell 'The Burgundy sleeps safe there,' said my father, and
thought over it. We had an extraordinary day. People stood fast to gaze
at us; in the country some pulled off their hats and set up a cheer.
The landlords of the inns where we baited remained bare-headed until we
started afresh, and I, according to my father's example, bowed and
lifted my cap gravely to persons saluting us along the roads. Nor did I
seek to know the reason for this excess of respectfulness; I was
beginning to take to it naturally. At the end of a dusty high-road,
where it descends the hill into a town, we drew up close by a high red
wall, behind which I heard boys shouting at play. We went among them,
accompanied by their master. My father tipped the head boy for the
benefit of the school, and following lunch with the master and his
daughter, to whom I gave a kiss at her request, a half-holiday was
granted to the boys in my name. How they cheered! The young lady saw my
delight, and held me at the window while my father talked with hers;
and for a long time after I beheld them in imagination talking: that is
to say, my father issuing his instructions and Mr. Rippenger receiving
them like a pliant hodman; for the result of it was that two days
later, without seeing my kings of England, my home again, or London, I
was Julia Rippenger's intimate friend and the youngest pupil of the
school. My father told me subsequently that we slept at an hotel those
two nights intervening. Memory transplants me from the coach and
scarlet livery straight to my place of imprisonment.