AN EXPEDITION
I wondered audibly where the Bench was when Temple and I sat together
alone at Squire Gregory's breakfast-table next morning, very thirsty
for tea. He said it was a place in London, but did not add the sort of
place, only that I should soon be coming to London with him; and I
remarked, 'Shall I?' and smiled at him, as if in a fit of careless
affection. Then he talked runningly of the theatres and pantomimes and
London's charms.
The fear I had of this Bench made me passingly conscious of Temple's
delicacy in not repeating its name, though why I feared it there was
nothing to tell me. I must have dreamed of it just before waking, and I
burned for reasonable information concerning it. Temple respected my
father too much to speak out the extent of his knowledge on the
subject, so we drank our tea with the grandeur of London for our theme,
where, Temple assured me, you never had a headache after a carouse
overnight: a communication that led me to think the country a far less
favourable place of abode for gentlemen. We quitted the house without
seeing our host or the captain, and greatly admired by the footmen, the
maids, and the grooms for having drunk their masters under the table,
which it could not be doubted that we had done, as Temple modestly
observed while we sauntered off the grounds under the eyes of the
establishment. We had done it fairly, too, with none of those Jack the
Giant-Killer tricks my grandfather accused us of.
The squire would not, and he could not, believe our story until he
heard the confession from the mouth of the captain. After that he said
we were men and heroes, and he tipped us both, much to Janet
Ilchester's advantage, for the squire was a royal giver, and Temple's
money had already begun to take the same road as mine.
Temple, in fact, was falling desperately in love; for this reason he
shrank from quitting Riversley. I perceived it as clearly as a thing
seen through a windowpane. He was always meditating upon dogs, and what
might be the price of this dog or that, and whether lapdogs were good
travellers. The fashionable value of pugs filled him with a sort of
despair. 'My goodness!' he used an exclamation more suitable to women,
'forty or fifty pounds you say one costs, Richie?'
I pretended to estimate the probable cost of one. 'Yes, about that; but
I'll buy you one, one day or other, Temple.'
The dear little fellow coloured hot; he was too much in earnest to
laugh at the absurdity of his being supposed to want a pug for himself,
and walked round me, throwing himself into attitudes with shrugs and
loud breathings. 'I don't... don't think that I... I care for nothing
but Newfoundlands and mastiffs,' said he. He went on shrugging and
kicking up his heels.
'Girls like pugs,' I remarked.
'I fancy they do,' said Temple, with a snort of indifference.
Then I suggested, 'A pocket-knife for the hunting-field is a very good
thing.'
'Do you think so?' was Temple's rejoinder, and I saw he was dreadfully
afraid of my speaking the person's name for whom it would be such a
very good thing.
'You can get one for thirty shillings. We'll get one when we're in
London. They're just as useful for women as they are for us, you know.'
'Why, of course they are, if they hunt,' said Temple.
'And we mustn't lose time,' I drew him to the point I had at heart,
'for hunting 'll soon be over. It's February, mind!'
'Oh, lots of time!' Temple cried out, and on every occasion when I
tried to make him understand that I was bursting to visit London, he
kept evading me, simply because he hated saying good-bye to Janet
Ilchester. His dulness of apprehension in not perceiving that I could
not commit a breach of hospitality by begging him downright to start,
struck me as extraordinary. And I was so acute. I saw every single idea
in his head, every shift of his mind, and how he half knew that he
profited by my shunning to say flatly I desired to set out upon the
discovery of the Bench. He took the benefit of my shamefacedness, for
which I daily punished his. I really felt that I was justified in
giving my irritability an airing by curious allusions to Janet; yet,
though I made him wince, it was impossible to touch his conscience. He
admitted to having repeatedly spoken of London's charms, and 'Oh, yes!
you and I'll go back together, Richie,' and saying that satisfied him:
he doubled our engagements with Janet that afternoon, and it was a
riding party, a dancing-party, and a drawing of a pond for carp, and we
over to Janet, and Janet over to us, until I grew so sick of her I was
incapable of summoning a spark of jealousy in order the better to
torture Temple.
Now, he was a quick-witted boy. Well, I one day heard Janet address my
big dog, Ajax, in the style she usually employed to inform her hearers,
and especially the proprietor, that she coveted a thing: 'Oh, you own
dear precious pet darling beauty! if I might only feed you every day of
my life I should be happy! I curtsey to him every time I see him. If I
were his master, the men should all off hats, and the women all
curtsey, to Emperor Ajax, my dog! my own! my great, dear irresistible
love! Then she nodded at me, 'I would make them, though.' And then at
Temple, 'You see if I wouldn't.'
Ajax was a source of pride to me. However, I heard Temple murmur, in a
tone totally unlike himself, 'He would be a great protection to you';
and I said to him, 'You know, Temple, I shall be going to London
to-morrow or the next day, not later: I don't know when I shall be
back. I wish you would dispose of the dog just as you like: get him a
kind master or mistress, that's all.'
I sacrificed my dog to bring Temple to his senses. I thought it would
touch him to see how much I could sacrifice just to get an excuse for
begging him to start. He did not even thank me. Ajax soon wore one of
Janet's collars, like two or three other of the Riversley dogs, and I
had the satisfaction of hearing Temple accept my grandfather's
invitation for a further fortnight. And, meanwhile, I was the one who
was charged with going about looking lovelorn! I smothered my feelings
and my reflections on the wisdom of people.
At last my aunt Dorothy found the means of setting me at liberty on the
road to London. We had related to her how Captain Bulsted toasted Julia
Rippenger, and we had both declared in joke that we were sure the
captain wished to be introduced to her. My aunt reserved her ideas on
the subject, but by-and-by she proposed to us to ride over to Julia,
and engage her to come and stay at Riversley for some days. Kissing me,
my aunt said, 'She was my Harry's friend when he was an outcast.'
The words revived my affection for Julia. Strong in the sacred sense of
gratitude, I turned on Temple, reproaching him with selfish
forgetfulness of her good heart and pretty face. Without defending
himself, as he might have done, he entreated me to postpone our journey
for a day; he and Janet had some appointment. Here was given me a noble
cause and matter I need not shrink from speaking of. I lashed Temple in
my aunt's presence with a rod of real eloquence that astonished her,
and him, and myself too; and as he had a sense of guilt not quite
explicable in his mind, he consented to bear what was in reality my
burden; for Julia had distinguished me and not him with all the signs
of affection, and of the two I had the more thoroughly forgotten her; I
believe Temple was first in toasting her at Squire Gregory's table.
There is nothing like a pent-up secret of the heart for accumulating
powers of speech; I mean in youth. The mental distilling process sets
in later, and then you have irony instead of eloquence. From brooding
on my father, and not daring to mention his name lest I should hear
evil of it, my thoughts were a proud family, proud of their origin,
proud of their isolation,—and not to be able to divine them was for the
world to confess itself basely beneath their level. But, when they did
pour out, they were tremendous, as Temple found. This oratorical
display of mine gave me an ascendancy over him. He adored eloquence,
not to say grandiloquence: he was the son of a barrister. 'Let's go and
see her at once, Richie,' he said of Julia. 'I'm ready to be off as
soon as you like; I'm ready to do anything that will please you'; which
was untrue, but it was useless to tell him so. I sighed at my sad gift
of penetration, and tossed the fresh example of it into the treasury of
vanity.
'Temple,' said I, dissembling a little; 'I tell you candidly: you won't
please me by doing anything disagreeable to you. A dog pulled by the
collar is not much of a companion. I start for Julia to-morrow before
daylight. If you like your bed best, stop there; and mind you amuse
Janet for me during my absence.'
'I'm not going to let any one make comparisons between us,' Temple
muttered.
He dropped dozens of similar remarks, and sometimes talked downright
flattery, I had so deeply impressed him.
We breakfasted by candle-light, and rode away on a frosty foggy
morning, keeping our groom fifty yards to the rear, a laughable sight,
with both his coat-pockets bulging, a couple of Riversley turnover
pasties in one, and a bottle of champagne in the other, for our lunch
on the road. Now and then, when near him, we galloped for the fun of
seeing him nurse the bottle-pocket. He was generally invisible. Temple
did not think it strange that we should be riding out in an unknown
world with only a little ring, half a stone's-throw clear around us,
and blots of copse, and queer vanishing cottages, and hard grey
meadows, fir-trees wonderfully magnified, and larches and birches
rigged like fairy ships, all starting up to us as we passed, and
melting instantly. One could have fancied the fir-trees black torches.
And here the shoulder of a hill invited us to race up to the ridge:
some way on we came to crossroads, careless of our luck in hitting the
right one: yonder hung a village church in the air, and church-steeple
piercing ever so high; and out of the heart of the mist leaped a brook,
and to hear it at one moment, and then to have the sharp freezing
silence in one's ear, was piercingly weird. It all tossed the mind in
my head like hay on a pitchfork. I forgot the existence of everything
but what I loved passionately,—and that had no shape, was like a wind.
Up on a knoll of firs in the middle of a heath, glowing rosy in the
frost, we dismounted to lunch, leaning against the warm saddles, Temple
and I, and Uberly, our groom, who reminded me of a certain tramp of my
acquaintance in his decided preference of beer to champagne; he drank,
though, and sparkled after his draught. No sooner were we on horseback
again—ere the flanks of the dear friendly brutes were in any way
cool—than Temple shouted enthusiastically, 'Richie, we shall do it yet!
I've been funking, but now I'm sure we shall do it. Janet said, “What's
the use of my coming over to dine at Riversley if Harry Richmond and
you don't come home before ten or eleven o'clock?” I told her we'd do
it by dinner-time: Don't you like Janet, Richie?—That is, if our
horses' hic-haec-hocks didn't get strained on this hard
nominative-plural-masculine of the article road. Don't you fancy
yourself dining with the captain, Richie? Dative huic, says old Squire
Gregory. I like to see him at dinner, because he loves the smell of his
wine. Oh! it's nothing to boast of, but we did drink them under the
table, it can't be denied. Janet heard of it. Hulloa! you talk of a
hunting-knife. What do you say to a pair of skates? Here we are in for
a frost of six weeks. It strikes me, a pair of skates...'
This was the champagne in Temple. In me it did not bubble to speech,
and I soon drew him on at a pace that rendered conversation impossible.
Uberly shouted after us to spare the horses' legs. We heard him twice
out of the deepening fog. I called to Temple that he was right, we
should do it. Temple hurrahed rather breathlessly. At the end of an
hour I pulled up at an inn, where I left the horses to be groomed and
fed, and walked away rapidly as if I knew the town, Temple following me
with perfect confidence, and, indeed, I had no intention to deceive
him. We entered a new station of a railway.
'Oh!' said Temple, 'the rest of the way by rail.'
When the railway clerk asked me what place I wanted tickets for, London
sprang to my mouth promptly in a murmur, and taking the tickets I
replied to Temple,
'The rest of the way by rail. Uberly's sure to stop at that inn'; but
my heart beat as the carriages slid away with us; an affectionate
commiseration for Temple touched me when I heard him count on our being
back at Riversley in time to dress for dinner.
He laughed aloud at the idea of our plumping down on Rippenger's
school, getting a holiday for the boys, tipping them, and then off with
Julia, exactly like two Gods of the Mythology, Apollo and Mercury.
'I often used to think they had the jolliest lives that ever were
lived,' he said, and trying to catch glimpses of the country, and
musing, and singing, he continued to feel like one of those blissful
Gods until wonder at the passage of time supervened. Amazement, when he
looked at my watch, struck him dumb. Ten minutes later we were in
yellow fog, then in brown. Temple stared at both windows and at me; he
jumped from his seat and fell on it, muttering, 'No; nonsense! I say!'
but he had accurately recognized London's fog. I left him unanswered to
bring up all his senses, which the railway had outstripped, for the
contemplation of this fact, that we two were in the city of London.