MY FATHER'S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER
My father's pleasure on the day of our journey to Bulsted was to drive
me out of London on a lofty open chariot, with which he made the
circuit of the fashionable districts, and caused innumerable heads to
turn. I would have preferred to go the way of other men, to be
unnoticed, but I was subject to an occasional glowing of undefined
satisfaction in the observance of the universally acknowledged harmony
existing between his pretensions, his tastes and habits, and his
person. He contrived by I know not what persuasiveness and simplicity
of manner and speech to banish from me the idea that he was engaged in
playing a high stake; and though I knew it, and he more than once
admitted it, there was an ease and mastery about him that afforded me
some degree of positive comfort still. I was still most securely
attached to his fortunes. Supposing the ghost of dead Hector to have
hung over his body when the inflamed son of Peleus whirled him at his
chariot wheels round Troy, he would, with his natural passions sobered
by Erebus, have had some of my reflections upon force and fate, and my
partial sense of exhilaration in the tremendous speed of the course
during the whole of the period my father termed his Grand Parade. I
showed just such acquiescence or resistance as were superinduced by the
variations of the ground. Otherwise I was spell-bound; and beyond
interdicting any further public mention of my name or the princess's, I
did nothing to thwart him. It would have been no light matter.
We struck a station at a point half-way down to Bulsted, and found
little Kiomi there, thunder in her brows, carrying a bundle, and
purchasing a railway-ticket, not to travel in our direction. She gave
me the singular answer that she could not tell me where her people
were; nor would she tell me whither she was going, alone, and by rail.
I chanced to speak of Heriot. One of her sheet-lightning flashes shot
out. 'He won't be at Bulsted,' she said, as if that had a significance.
I let her know we were invited to Bulsted. 'Oh, she's at home'; Kiomi
blinked, and her features twitched like whip-cord. I saw that she was
possessed by one of her furies. That girl's face had the art of making
me forget beautiful women, and what beauty was by comparison.
It happened that the squire came across us as we were rounding the
slope of larch and fir plantation near a part of the Riversley hollows,
leading to the upper heath-land, where, behind a semicircle of birches,
Bulsted lay. He was on horseback, and called hoarsely to the captain's
coachman, who was driving us, to pull up. 'Here, Harry,' he sang out to
me, in the same rough voice, 'I don't see why we should bother Captain
William. It's a bit of business, not pleasure. I've got the book in my
pocket. You ask—is it convenient to step into my bailiff's cottage hard
by, and run through it? Ten minutes 'll tell me all I want to know. I
want it done with. Ask.'
My father stood up and bowed, bareheaded.
My grandfather struck his hat and bobbed.
'Mr. Beltham, I trust I see you well.'
'Better, sir, when I've got rid of a damned unpleasant bit o'
business.'
'I offer you my hearty assistance.'
'Do you? Then step down and come into my bailiff's.'
'I come, sir.'
My father alighted from the carriage. The squire cast his gouty leg to
be quit of his horse, but not in time to check my father's advances and
ejaculations of condolence.
'Gout, Mr. Beltham, is a little too much a proof to us of a long line
of ancestry.'
His hand and arm were raised in the form of a splint to support the
squire, who glared back over his cheekbone, horrified that he could not
escape the contact, and in too great pain from arthritic throes to
protest: he resembled a burglar surprised by justice. 'What infernal
nonsense,... fellow talking now?' I heard him mutter between his
hoppings and dancings, with one foot in the stirrup and a toe to earth,
the enemy at his heel, and his inclination half bent upon swinging to
the saddle again.
I went to relieve him. 'Damn!... Oh, it's you,' said he.
The squire directed Uberly, acting as his groom, to walk his horse up
and down the turf fronting young Tom Eckerthy's cottage, and me to
remain where I was; then hobbled up to the door, followed at a
leisurely march by my father. The door opened. My father swept the old
man in before him, with a bow and flourish that admitted of no
contradiction, and the door closed on them. I caught a glimpse of
Uberly screwing his wrinkles in a queer grimace, while he worked his
left eye and thumb expressively at the cottage, by way of communicating
his mind to Samuel, Captain Bulsted's coachman; and I became quite of
his opinion as to the nature of the meeting, that it was comical and
not likely to lead to much. I thought of the princess and of my hope of
her depending upon such an interview as this. From that hour when I
stepped on the sands of the Continent to the day of my quitting them, I
had been folded in a dream: I had stretched my hands to the highest
things of earth, and here now was the retributive material
money-question, like a keen scythe-blade!
The cottage-door continued shut. The heaths were darkening. I heard a
noise of wheels, and presently the unmistakable voice of Janet saying,
'That must be Harry.' She was driving my aunt Dorothy. Both of them
hushed at hearing that the momentous duel was in progress. Janet's
first thought was of the squire. 'I won't have him ride home in the
dark,' she said, and ordered Uberly to walk the horse home. The ladies
had a ladies' altercation before Janet would permit my aunt to yield
her place and proceed on foot, accompanied by me. Naturally the best
driver of the two kept the whip. I told Samuel to go on to Bulsted,
with word that we were coming: and Janet, nodding bluntly, agreed to
direct my father as to where he might expect to find me on the
Riversley road. My aunt Dorothy and I went ahead slowly: at her request
I struck a pathway to avoid the pony-carriage, which was soon audible;
and when Janet, chattering to the squire, had gone by, we turned back
to intercept my father. He was speechless at the sight of Dorothy
Beltham. At his solicitation, she consented to meet him next day; his
account of the result of the interview was unintelligible to her as
well as to me. Even after leaving her at the park-gates, I could get
nothing definite from him, save that all was well, and that the squire
was eminently practical; but he believed he had done an excellent
evening's work. 'Yes,' said he, rubbing his hands, 'excellent! making
due allowances for the emphatically commoner's mind we have to deal
with.' And then to change the subject he dilated on that strange story
of the man who, an enormous number of years back in the date of the
world's history, carried his little son on his shoulders one night when
the winds were not so boisterous, though we were deeper in Winter,
along the identical road we traversed, between the gorsemounds, across
the heaths, with yonder remembered fir-tree clump in sight and the
waste-water visible to footfarers rounding under the firs. At
night-time he vowed, that as far as nature permitted it, he had
satisfied the squire—'completely satisfied him, I mean,' he said, to
give me sound sleep. 'No doubt of it; no doubt of it, Richie.'
He won Julia's heart straight off, and Captain Bulsted's profound
admiration. 'Now I know the man I've always been adoring since you were
so high, Harry,' said she. Captain Bulsted sighed: 'Your husband bows
to your high good taste, my dear.' They relished him sincerely, and
between them and him I suffered myself to be dandled once more into a
state of credulity, until I saw my aunt Dorothy in the afternoon
subsequent to the appointed meeting. His deep respect and esteem for
her had stayed him from answering any of her questions falsely. To that
extent he had been veracious. It appeared, that driven hard by the
squire, who would have no waving of flags and lighting of fireworks in
a matter of business, and whose 'commoner's mind' chafed sturdily at a
hint of the necessity for lavish outlays where there was a princess to
win, he had rallied on the fiction that many of the cheques, standing
for the bulk of the sums expended, were moneys borrowed by him of me,
which he designed to repay, and was prepared to repay instantly—could
in fact, the squire demanding it, repay, as it were, on the spot; for
behold, these borrowed moneys were not spent; they were moneys invested
in undertakings, put out to high rates of interest; moneys that perhaps
it would not be adviseable to call in without a season of delay; still,
if Mr. Beltham, acting for his grandson and heir, insisted, it should
be done. The moneys had been borrowed purely to invest them with profit
on my behalf: a gentleman's word of honour was pledged to it.
The squire grimly gave him a couple of months to make it good.
Dorothy Beltham and my father were together for about an hour at
Eckerthy's farm. She let my father kiss her hand when he was bending to
take his farewell of her, but held her face away. He was in manifest
distress, hardly master of his voice, begged me to come to him soon,
and bowing, with 'God bless you, madam, my friend on earth!' turned his
heel, bearing his elastic frame lamentably. A sad or a culprit air did
not befit him: one reckoned up his foibles and errors when seeing him
under a partly beaten aspect. At least, I did; not my dear aunt, who
was compassionate of him, however thoroughly she condemned his ruinous
extravagance, and the shifts and evasions it put him to. She feared,
that instead of mending the difficulty, he had postponed merely to
exaggerate it in the squire's mind; and she was now of opinion that the
bringing him down to meet the squire was very bad policy, likely to
result in danger to my happiness; for, if the money should not be
forthcoming on the date named, all my father's faults would be
transferred to me as his accomplice, both in the original wastefulness
and the subterfuges invented to conceal it. I recollected that a sum of
money had really been sunk in Prince Ernest's coal-mine. My aunt said
she hoped for the best.
Mounting the heaths, we looked back on the long yellow road, where the
carriage conveying my father to the railway-station was visible, and
talked of him, and of the elements of antique tragedy in his history,
which were at that period, let me say, precisely what my incessant
mental efforts were strained to expel from the idea of our human life.
The individual's freedom was my tenet of faith; but pity pleaded for
him that he was well-nigh irresponsible, was shamefully sinned against
at his birth, one who could charge the Gods with vindictiveness, and
complain of the persecution of natal Furies. My aunt Dorothy advised me
to take him under my charge, and sell his house and furniture, make him
live in bachelor chambers with his faithful waiting-woman and a single
manservant.
'He will want money even to do that,' I remarked.
She murmured, 'Is there not some annual income paid to him?'
Her quick delicacy made her redden in alluding so closely to his
personal affairs, and I loved her for the nice feeling. 'It was not
much,' I said. The miserable attempt to repair the wrongs done to him
with this small annuity angered me—and I remembered, little pleased,
the foolish expectations he founded on this secret acknowledgement of
the justice of his claims. 'We won't talk of it,' I pursued. 'I wish he
had never touched it. I shall interdict him.'
'You would let him pay his debts with it, Harry?'
'I am not sure, aunty, that he does not incur a greater debt by
accepting it.'
'One's wish would be, that he might not ever be in need of it.'
'Ay, or never be caring to find the key of it.'
'That must be waste of time,' she said.
I meant something else, but it was useless to tell her so.