HOMEWARD AND HOME AGAIN
The room was in flames, Baroness Turckems plucking at the bell-rope, my
father looking big and brilliant.
'Hold hand!' he shouted to the frenzied baroness.
She counter-shouted; both of them stamped feet; the portico sentinel
struck the butt of his musket on the hall-doors; bell answered bell
along the upper galleries.
'Foolish woman, be silent!' cried my father.
'Incendiary!' she half-shrieked.
He turned to the princess, begging her to retire, but she stared at
him, and I too, after having seen him deliberately apply the flame of
her lamp to the curtains, deemed him mad. He was perfectly
self-possessed, and said, 'This will explain the bell!' and fetched a
deep breath, and again urged the princess to retire.
Peterborough was the only one present who bethought him of doing
fireman's duty. The risk looked greater than it was. He had but to tear
the lighted curtains down and trample on them. Suddenly the baroness
called out, 'The man is right! Come with me, princess; escape, your
Highness, escape! And you,' she addressed me—'you rang the bell, you!'
'To repair your error, baroness,' said my father.
'I have my conscience pure; have you?' she retorted.
He bowed and said, 'The fire will also excuse your presence on the
spot, baroness.'
'I thank my God I am not so cool as you,' said she.
'Your warmth'—he bent to her—'shall always be your apology, baroness.'
Seeing the curtains extinguished, Ottilia withdrew. She gave me no
glance.
All this occurred before the night-porter, who was going his rounds,
could reach the library. Lacqueys and maids were soon at his heels. My
father met Prince Ernest with a florid story of a reckless student,
either asleep or too anxious to secure a particular volume, and showed
his usual consideration by not asking me to verify the narrative. With
that, and with high praise of Peterborough, as to whose gallantry I
heard him deliver a very circumstantial account, he, I suppose,
satisfied the prince's curiosity, and appeased him, the damage being
small compared with the uproar. Prince Ernest questioned two or three
times, 'What set him ringing so furiously?' My father made some reply.
Ottilia's cloud-pale windows were the sole greeting I had from her on
my departure early next morning, far wretcheder than if I had
encountered a misfortune. It was impossible for me to deny that my
father had shielded the princess: she would never have run for a
menace. As he remarked, the ringing of the bell would not of itself
have forced her to retreat, and the nature of the baroness's alarm
demanded nothing less than a conflagration to account for it to the
household. But I felt humiliated on Ottilia's behalf, and enraged on my
own. And I had, I must confess, a touch of fear of a man who could
unhesitatingly go to extremities, as he had done, by summoning fire to
the rescue. He assured me that moments such as those inspired him and
were the pride of his life, and he was convinced that, upon reflection,
'I should rise to his pitch.' He deluded himself with the idea of his
having foiled Baroness Turckems, nor did I choose to contest it, though
it struck me that she was too conclusively the foiler. She must have
intercepted the letter for the princess. I remembered acting carelessly
in handing it to my father for him to consign it to one of the
domestics, and he passed it on with a flourish. Her place of
concealment was singularly well selected under the sofa-cover, and the
little heaps of paper-bound volumes. I do not fancy she meant to rouse
the household; her notion probably was to terrorize the princess, that
she might compel her to quit my presence. In rushing to the bell-rope,
her impetuosity sent her stumbling on it with force, and while
threatening to ring, and meaning merely to threaten, she rang; and as
it was not a retractable act, she continued ringing, and the more
violently upon my father's appearance. Catching sight of Peterborough
at his heels, she screamed a word equivalent to a clergyman. She had
lost her discretion, but not her wits.
For any one save a lover—thwarted as I was, and perturbed by the shadow
falling on the princess—my father's Aplomb and promptness in conjuring
a check to what he assumed to be a premeditated piece of villany on the
part of Baroness Turckems, might have seemed tolerably worthy of
admiration. Me the whole scene affected as if it had burnt my skin. I
loathed that picture of him, constantly present to me, of his shivering
the glass of Ottilia's semi-classical night-lamp, gravely asking her
pardon, and stretching the flame to the curtain, with large eyes
blazing on the baroness. The stupid burlesque majesty of it was
unendurable to thought. Nevertheless, I had to thank him for shielding
Ottilia, and I had to brood on the fact that I had drawn her into a
situation requiring such a shield. He, meanwhile, according to his
habit, was engaged in reviewing the triumphs to come. 'We have won a
princess!' And what England would say, how England would look, when, on
a further journey, I brought my princess home, entirely occupied his
imagination, to my excessive torture—a state of mind for which it was
impossible to ask his mercy. His sole link with the past appeared to be
this notion that he had planned all the good things in store for us.
Consequently I was condemned to hear of the success of the plot,
until—for I had not the best of consciences—I felt my hand would be
spell-bound in the attempt to write to the princess; and with that
sense of incapacity I seemed to be cut loose from her, drifting back
into the desolate days before I saw her wheeled in her invalid chair
along the sands and my life knew sunrise.
But whatever the mood of our affections, so it is with us island
wanderers: we cannot gaze over at England, knowing the old country to
be close under the sea-line, and not hail it, and partly forget
ourselves in the time that was. The smell of sea-air made me long for
the white cliffs, the sight of the white cliffs revived pleasant
thoughts of Riversley, and thoughts of Riversley thoughts of Janet,
which were singularly and refreshingly free from self-accusations. Some
love for my home, similar to what one may have for Winter, came across
me, and some appreciation of Janet as well, in whose society was sure
to be at least myself, a creature much reduced in altitude, but without
the cramped sensations of a man on a monument. My hearty Janet! I
thanked her then for seeing me of my natural height.
Some hours after parting with my father in London, I lay down to sleep
in my old home, feeling as if I had thrown off a coat of armour. I
awoke with a sailor's song on my lips. Looking out of window at the
well-known features of the heaths and dark firs, and waning oak copses,
and the shadowy line of the downs stretching their long whale backs
South to West, it struck me that I had been barely alive of late.
Indeed one who consents to live as I had done, in a hope and a
retrospect, will find his life slipping between the two, like the ships
under the striding Colossus. I shook myself, braced myself, and saluted
every one at the breakfast table with the frankness of Harry Richmond.
Congratulated on my splendid spirits, I was confirmed in the idea that
I enjoyed them, though I knew of something hollow which sent an echo
through me at intervals. Janet had become a fixed inmate of the house.
'I've bought her, and I shall keep her; she's the apple of my eye,'
said the squire, adding with characteristic scrupulousness, 'if apple's
female.' I asked her whether she had heard from Temple latterly. 'No;
dear little fellow!' cried she, and I saw in a twinkling what it was
that the squire liked in her, and liked it too. I caught sight of
myself, as through a rift of cloud, trotting home from the hunt to a
glad, frank, unpretending mate, with just enough of understanding to
look up to mine. For a second or so it was pleasing, as a glance out of
his library across hill and dale will be to a strained student. Our
familiarity sanctioned a comment on the growth of her
daughter-of-the-regiment moustache, the faintest conceivable suggestion
of a shadow on her soft upper lip, which a poet might have feigned to
have fallen from her dark thick eyebrows.
'Why, you don't mean to say, Hal, it's not to your taste?' said the
squire.
'No,' said I, turning an eye on my aunt Dorothy, 'I've loved it all my
life.'
The squire stared at me to make sure of this, muttered that it was to
his mind a beauty, and that it was nothing more on Janet's lip than
down on a flower, bloom on a plum. The poetical comparisons had the
effect of causing me to examine her critically. She did not raise a
spark of poetical sentiment in my bosom. She had grown a tall young
woman, firmly built, light of motion, graceful perhaps; but it was not
the grace of grace: the grace of simplicity, rather. She talked
vivaciously and frankly, and gave (to friends) her whole eyes and a
fine animation in talking; and her voice was a delight to friends;
there was always the full ring of Janet in it, and music also. She
still lifted her lip when she expressed contempt or dislike of persons;
nor was she cured of her trick of frowning. She was as ready as ever to
be flattered; that was evident. My grandfather's praise of her she
received with a rewarding look back of kindness; she was not
discomposed by flattery, and threw herself into no postures, nor
blushed very deeply. 'Thank you for perceiving my merits,' she seemed
to say; and to be just I should add that one could fancy her saying,
you see them because you love me. She wore her hair in a plain knot,
peculiarly neatly rounded away from the temples, which sometimes gave
to a face not aquiline a look of swiftness. The face was mobile,
various, not at all suggestive of bad temper, in spite of her frowns.
The profile of it was less assuring than the front, because of the dark
eyebrows' extension and the occasional frown, but that was not shared
by the mouth, which was, I admitted to myself, a charming bow, running
to a length at the corners like her eyebrows, quick with smiles. The
corners of the mouth would often be in movement, setting dimples at
work in her cheek, while the brows remained fixed, and thus at times a
tender meditative air was given her that I could not think her own.
Upon what could she possibly reflect? She had not a care, she had no
education, she could hardly boast an idea—two at a time I was sure she
never had entertained. The sort of wife for a fox-hunting lord, I
summed up, and hoped he would be a good fellow.
Peterborough was plied by the squire for a description of German women.
Blushing and shooting a timid look from under his pendulous eyelids at
my aunt, indicating that he was prepared to go the way of tutors at
Riversley, he said he really had not much observed them.
'They're a whitey-brown sort of women, aren't they?' the squire
questioned him, 'with tow hair and fish eyes, high o' the shoulder,
bony, and a towel skin and gone teeth, so I've heard tell. I've heard
that's why the men have all taken to their beastly smoking.'
Peterborough ejaculated: 'Indeed! sir, really!' He assured my aunt that
German ladies were most agreeable, cultivated persons, extremely
domesticated, retiring; the encomiums of the Roman historian were as
well deserved by them in the present day as they had been in the past;
decidedly, on the whole, Peterborough would call them a virtuous race.
'Why do they let the men smoke, then?' said the squire. 'A pretty style
o' courtship. Come, sit by my hearth, ma'am; I'll be your
chimney—faugh! dirty rascals!'
Janet said: 'I rather like the smell of cigars.'
'Like what you please, my dear—he'll be a lucky dog,' the squire
approved her promptly, and asked me if I smoked.
I was not a stranger to the act, I confessed.
'Well'—he took refuge in practical philosophy—'a man must bring some
dirt home from every journey: only don't smoke me out, mercy's sake.'
Here was a hint of Janet's influence with him, and of what he expected
from my return to Riversley.
Peterborough informed me that he suffered persecution over the last
glasses of Port in the evening, through the squire's persistent
inquiries as to whether a woman had anything to do with my staying so
long abroad. 'A lady, sir?' quoth Peterborough. 'Lady, if you like,'
rejoined the squire. 'You parsons and petticoats must always mince the
meat to hash the fact.' Peterborough defended his young friend Harry's
moral reputation, and was amazed to hear that the squire did not think
highly of a man's chastity. The squire acutely chagrined the sensitive
gentleman by drawling the word after him, and declaring that he tossed
that kind of thing into the women's wash-basket. Peterborough, not
without signs of indignation, protesting, the squire asked him
point-blank if he supposed that Old England had been raised to the head
of the world by such as he. In fine, he favoured Peterborough with a
lesson in worldly views. 'But these,' Peterborough said to me, 'are not
the views, dear Harry—if they are the views of ladies of any
description, which I take leave to doubt—not the views of the ladies
you and I would esteem. For instance, the ladies of this household.' My
aunt Dorothy's fate was plain.
In reply to my grandfather's renewed demand to know whether any one of
those High-Dutch women had got hold of me, Peterborough said: 'Mr.
Beltham, the only lady of whom it could be suspected that my friend
Harry regarded her with more than ordinary admiration was
Hereditary-Princess of one of the ancient princely Houses of Germany.'
My grandfather thereupon said, 'Oh!' pushed the wine, and was stopped.
Peterborough chuckled over this 'Oh!' and the stoppage of further
questions, while acknowledging that the luxury of a pipe would help to
make him more charitable. He enjoyed the Port of his native land, but
he did, likewise, feel the want of one whiff or so of the less
restrictive foreigner's pipe; and he begged me to note the curiosity of
our worship of aristocracy and royalty; and we, who were such slaves to
rank, and such tyrants in our own households,—we Britons were the great
sticklers for freedom! His conclusion was, that we were not logical. We
would have a Throne, which we would not allow the liberty to do
anything to make it worthy of rational veneration: we would have a
peerage, of which we were so jealous that it formed almost an assembly
of automatons; we would have virtuous women, only for them to be
pursued by immoral men. Peterborough feared, he must say, that we were
an inconsequent people. His residence abroad had so far unhinged him;
but a pipe would have stopped his complainings.
Moved, perhaps, by generous wine, in concert with his longing for
tobacco, he dropped an observation of unwonted shrewdness; he said:
'The squire, my dear Harry, a most honourable and straightforward
country gentleman, and one of our very wealthiest, is still, I would
venture to suggest, an example of old blood that requires—I study
race—varying, modifying, one might venture to say, correcting; and
really, a friend with more privileges than I possess, would or should
throw him a hint that no harm has been done to the family by an
intermixture... old blood does occasionally need it—you know I study
blood—it becomes too coarse, or, in some cases, too fine. The study of
the mixture of blood is probably one of our great physical problems.'
Peterborough commended me to gratitude for the imaginative and
chivalrous element bestowed on me by a father that was other than a
country squire; one who could be tolerant of innocent habits, and not
of guilty ones—a further glance at the interdicted pipe. I left him
almost whimpering for it.
The contemplation of the curious littleness of the lives of men and
women lived in this England of ours, made me feel as if I looked at
them out of a palace balcony-window; for no one appeared to hope very
much or to fear; people trotted in their different kinds of harness;
and I was amused to think of my heart going regularly in imitation of
those about me. I was in a princely state of mind indeed, not
disinclined for a time to follow the general course of life, while
despising it. An existence without colour, without anxious throbbing,
without salient matter for thought, challenged contempt. But it was
exceedingly funny. My aunt Dorothy, the squire, and Janet submitted to
my transparent inward laughter at them, patiently waiting for me to
share their contentment, in the deluded belief that the hour would
come. The principal items of news embraced the death of Squire Gregory
Bulsted, the marriage of this and that young lady, a legal contention
between my grandfather and Lady Maria Higginson, the wife of a rich
manufacturer newly located among us, on account of a right of
encampment on Durstan heath, my grandfather taking side with the
gipsies, and beating her ladyship—a friend of Heriot's, by the way.
Concerning Heriot, my aunt Dorothy was in trouble. She could not, she
said, approve his behaviour in coming to this neighbourhood at all, and
she hinted that I might induce him to keep away. I mentioned Julia
Bulsted's being in mourning, merely to bring in her name tentatively.
'Ay, mourning's her outer rig, never doubt,' said the squire. 'Flick
your whip at her, she's a charitable soul, Judy Bulsted! She knits
stockings for the poor. She'd down and kiss the stump of a sailor on a
stick o' timber. All the same, she oughtn't to be alone. Pity she
hasn't a baby. You and I'll talk it over by-and-by, Harry.'
Kiomi was spoken of, and Lady Maria Higginson, and then Heriot.
'M-m-m-m rascal!' hummed the squire. 'There's three, and that's not
enough for him. Six months back a man comes over from Surreywards, a
farm he calls Dipwell, and asks after you, Harry; rigmaroles about a
handsome lass gone off... some scoundrel! You and I'll talk it over
by-and-by, Harry.'
Janet raised and let fall her eyebrows. The fiction, that so much
having been said, an immediate show of reserve on such topics preserved
her in ignorance of them, was one she subscribed to merely to humour
the squire. I was half in doubt whether I disliked or admired her want
of decent hypocrisy. She allowed him to suppose that she did not hear,
but spoke as a party to the conversation. My aunt Dorothy blamed Julia.
The squire thundered at Heriot; Janet, liking both, contented herself
with impartial comments.
'I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,' she
said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all
things in it. We rode over to Julia's cottage, on the outskirts of the
estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly
bewitching lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the
captain was doing, serving his country in foreign parts, while such as
these were shining without a captain at home. Janet approved his
conduct, and was right. 'What can a wife think the man worth who sits
down to guard his house-door?' she answered my slight innuendo. She
compared the man to a kennel-dog. 'This,' said I, 'comes of made-up
matches,' whereat she was silent.
Julia took her own view of her position. She asked me whether it was
not dismal for one who was called a grass widow, and was in reality a
salt-water one, to keep fresh, with a lapdog, a cook, and a
maid-servant, and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for twice
that he opened it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing
creature day after day! At first she was shy, stole out a coy line of
fingers to be shaken, and lisped; and out of that mood came
right-about-face, with an exclamation of regret that she supposed she
must not kiss me now. I projected, she drew back. 'Shall Janet go?'
said I. 'Then if nobody's present I'll be talked of,' said she, moaning
queerly. The tendency of her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her
handsome face an aspect deliriously wild. I complimented her on her
keeping so fresh, in spite of her salt-water widowhood. She turned the
tables on me for looking so powerful, though I was dying for a foreign
princess.
'Oh! but that'll blow over,' she said; 'anything blows over as long as
you don't go up to the altar'; and she eyed her ringed finger,
woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her
William. Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she
informed me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a
plot of ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the
squire and the other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping.
'And if you get Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it'll be
better for him, I'm sure,' she added, and naively:
'I'd like to meet him up at the Grange.' Temple, she said, had left the
Navy and was reading in London for the Bar—good news to me.
'You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,' Janet
observed on the ride home.
'Do you take her for a real person, Janet?'
'One thinks of her as a snow-mountain you've been admiring.'
'Very well; so let her be.'
'Is she kind and good?'
'Yes.'
'Does she ride well?'
'She rides remarkably well.'
'She's fair, I suppose?'
'Janet, if I saw you married to Temple, it would be the second great
wish of my heart.'
'Harry, you're a bit too cruel, as Julia would say.'
'Have you noticed she gets more and more Irish?'
'Perhaps she finds it is liked. Some women can adapt themselves...
they're the happiest. All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess
is like the rest of us?'
'Not at all,' said I, unconscious of hurting.
'Never mind. Don't be hard on Julia. She has the making of a good
woman—a girl can see that; only she can't bear loneliness, and doesn't
understand yet what it is to be loved by a true gentleman. Persons of
that class can't learn it all at once.'
I was pained to see her in tears. Her figure was straight, and she
spoke without a quaver of her voice.
'Heriot's an excellent fellow,' I remarked.
'He is. I can't think ill of my friends,' said she.
'Dear girl, is it these two who make you unhappy?'
'No; but dear old grandada!...'
The course of her mind was obvious. I would rather have had her less
abrupt and more personal in revealing it. I stammered something.
'Heriot does not know you as I do,' she said, strangling a whimper. 'I
was sure it was serious, though one's accustomed to associate
princesses with young men's dreams. I fear, Harry, it will half break
our dear old grandada's heart. He is rough, and you have often been
against him, for one unfortunate reason. If you knew him as I do you
would pity him sincerely. He hardly grumbled at all at your terribly
long absence. Poor old man! he hopes on.'
'He's incurably unjust to my father.'
'Your father has been with you all the time, Harry? I guessed it.'
'Well?'
'It generally bodes no good to the Grange. Do pardon me for saying
that. I know nothing of him; I know only that the squire is generous,
and THAT I stand for with all my might. Forgive me for what I said.'
'Forgive you—with all my heart. I like you all the better. You're a
brave partisan. I don't expect women to be philosophers.'
'Well, Harry, I would take your side as firmly as anybody's.'
'Do, then; tell the squire how I am situated.'
'Ah!' she half sighed, 'I knew this was coming.'
'How could it other than come? You can do what you like with the
squire. I'm dependent on him, and I am betrothed to the Princess
Ottilia. God knows how much she has to trample down on her part. She
casts off—to speak plainly, she puts herself out of the line of
succession, and for whom? for me. In her father's lifetime she will
hardly yield me her hand; but I must immediately be in a position to
offer mine. She may: who can tell? she is above all women in power and
firmness. You talk of generosity; could there be a higher example of
it?'
'I daresay; I know nothing of princesses,' Janet murmured. 'I don't
quite comprehend what she has done. The point is, what am I to do?'
'Prepare him for it. Soothe him in advance. Why, dear Janet, you can
reconcile him to anything in a minute.'
'Lie to him downright?'
'Now what on earth is the meaning of that, and why can't you speak
mildly?'
'I suppose I speak as I feel. I'm a plain speaker, a plain person. You
don't give me an easy task, friend Harry.'
'If you believe in his generosity, Janet, should you be afraid to put
it to proof?'
'Grandada's generosity, Harry? I do believe in it as I believe in my
own life. It happens to be the very thing I must keep myself from
rousing in him, to be of any service to you. Look at the old house!'
She changed her tone. 'Looking on old Riversley with the eyes of my
head even, I think I'm looking at something far away in the memory.
Perhaps the deep red brick causes it. There never was a house with so
many beautiful creepers. Bright as they are, you notice the roses on
the wall. There's a face for me forever from every window; and
good-bye, Riversley! Harry, I'll obey your wishes.'
So saying, she headed me, trotting down the heath-track.