A Pedigree and other Family Matters
Early in the Regency of George the Magnificent, there lived in a small
town in the west of England, called Clavering, a gentleman whose name
was Pendennis. There were those alive who remembered having seen his
name painted on a board, which was surmounted by a gilt pestle and
mortar over the door of a very humble little shop in the city of Bath,
where Mr. Pendennis exercised the profession of apothecary and surgeon;
and where he not only attended gentlemen in their sick-rooms, and
ladies at the most interesting periods of their lives, but would
condescend to sell a brown-paper plaster to a farmer’s wife across the
counter,—or to vend tooth-brushes, hair-powder, and London perfumery.
For these facts a few folks at Clavering could vouch, where people’s
memories were more tenacious, perhaps, than they are in a great
bustling metropolis.
And yet that little apothecary who sold a stray customer a pennyworth
of salts, or a more fragrant cake of Windsor soap, was a gentleman of
good education, and of as old a family as any in the whole county of
Somerset. He had a Cornish pedigree which carried the Pendennises up to
the time of the Druids, and who knows how much farther back? They had
intermarried with the Normans at a very late period of their family
existence, and they were related to all the great families of Wales and
Brittany. Pendennis had had a piece of University education too, and
might have pursued that career with great honour, but that in his
second year at Cambridge his father died insolvent, and poor Pen was
obliged to betake himself to the pestle and apron. He always detested
the trade, and it was only necessity, and the offer of his mother’s
brother, a London apothecary of low family, into which Pendennis’s
father had demeaned himself by marrying, that forced John Pendennis
into so odious a calling.
He quickly after his apprenticeship parted from the coarse-minded
practitioner his relative, and set up for himself at Bath with his
modest medical ensign. He had for some time a hard struggle with
poverty; and it was all he could do to keep the shop and its gilt
ornaments in decent repair, and his bed-ridden mother in comfort: but
Lady Ribstone happening to be passing to the Rooms with an intoxicated
Irish chairman who bumped her ladyship up against Pen’s very door-post,
and drove his chair-pole through the handsomest pink bottle in the
surgeon’s window, alighted screaming from her vehicle, and was
accommodated with a chair in Mr. Pendennis’s shop, where she was
brought round with cinnamon and sal-volatile.
Mr. Pendennis’s manners were so uncommonly gentlemanlike and soothing,
that her ladyship, the wife of Sir Pepin Ribstone, of Codlingbury, in
the county of Somerset, Bart., appointed her preserver, as she called
him, apothecary to her person and family, which was very large. Master
Ribstone coming home for the Christmas holidays from Eton, over-ate
himself and had a fever, in which Mr. Pendennis treated him with the
greatest skill and tenderness. In a word, he got the good graces of the
Codlingbury family, and from that day began to prosper. The good
company of Bath patronised him, and amongst the ladies especially he
was beloved and admired. First his humble little shop became a smart
one: then he discarded the selling of tooth-brushes and perfumery, as
unworthy of a gentleman of an ancient lineage: then he shut up the shop
altogether, and only had a little surgery attended by a genteel young
man: then he had a gig with a man to drive him; and, before her exit
from this world, his poor old mother had the happiness of seeing from
her bedroom window to which her chair was rolled, her beloved John step
into a close carriage of his own, a one-horse carriage it is true, but
with the arms of the family of Pendennis handsomely emblazoned on the
panels. “What would Arthur say now?” she asked, speaking of a younger
son of hers—“who never so much as once came to see my dearest Johnny
through all the time of his poverty and struggles!”
“Captain Pendennis is with his regiment in India, mother,” Mr.
Pendennis remarked, “and, if you please, I wish you would not call me
Johnny before the young man—before Mr. Parkins.”
Presently the day came when she ceased to call her son by the name of
Johnny, or by any other title of endearment or affection; and his house
was very lonely without that kind though querulous voice. He had his
night-bell altered and placed in the room in which the good old lady
had grumbled for many a long year, and he slept in the great large bed
there. He was upwards of forty years old when these events befell;
before the war was over; before George the Magnificent came to the
throne; before this history indeed: but what is a gentleman without his
pedigree? Pendennis, by this time, had his handsomely framed and
glazed, and hanging up in his drawing-room between the pictures of
Codlingbury House in Somersetshire, and St. Boniface’s College,
Cambridge, where he had passed the brief and happy days of his early
manhood. As for the pedigree he had taken it out of a trunk, as
Sterne’s officer called for his sword, now that he was a gentleman and
could show it.
About the time of Mrs. Pendennis’s demise, another of her son’s
patients likewise died at Bath; that virtuous woman, old Lady
Pontypool, daughter of Reginald twelfth Earl of Bareacres, and by
consequence great-grand-aunt to the present Earl, and widow of John
second Lord Pontypool, and likewise of the Reverend Jonas Wales, of the
Armageddon Chapel, Clifton. For the last five years of her life her
ladyship had been attended by Miss Helen Thistlewood, a very distant
relative of the noble house of Bareacres, before mentioned, and
daughter of Lieutenant R. Thistlewood, R.N., killed at the battle of
Copenhagen. Under Lady Pontypool’s roof Miss Thistlewood found a
comfortable shelter, as far as boarding and lodging went, but suffered
under such an infernal tyranny as only women can inflict on, or bear
from, one another: the Doctor, who paid his visits to my Lady Pontypool
at least twice a day, could not but remark the angelical sweetness and
kindness with which the young lady bore her elderly relative’s insults;
and it was, as they were going in the fourth mourning coach to attend
her ladyship’s venerated remains to Bath Abbey, where they now repose,
that he looked at her sweet pale face and resolved upon putting a
certain question to her, the very nature of which made his pulse beat
ninety, at least.
He was older than she by more than twenty years, and at no time the
most ardent of men. Perhaps he had had a love affair in early life
which he had to strangle—perhaps all early love affairs ought to be
strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens: well, at
three-and-forty he was a collected quiet little gentleman in black
stockings with a bald head, and a few days after the ceremony he called
to see her, and, as he felt her pulse, he kept hold of her hand in his,
and asked her where she was going to live now that the Pontypool family
had come down upon the property, which was being nailed into boxes, and
packed into hampers, and swaddled up with haybands, and buried in
straw, and locked under three keys in green baize plate-chests, and
carted away under the eyes of poor Miss Helen,—he asked her where she
was going to live finally.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she said she did not know. She had a
little money. The old lady had left her a thousand pounds, indeed; and
she would go into a boarding-house or into a school: in fine, she did
not know where.
Then Pendennis, looking into her pale face, and keeping hold of her
cold little hand, asked her if she would come and live with him? He was
old compared to—to so blooming a young lady as Miss Thistlewood
(Pendennis was of the grave old complimentary school of gentlemen and
apothecaries), but he was of good birth, and, he flattered himself, of
good principles and temper. His prospects were good, and daily mending.
He was alone in the world, and had need of a kind and constant
companion, whom it would be the study of his life to make happy; in a
word, he recited to her a little speech, which he had composed that
morning in bed, and rehearsed and perfected in his carriage, as he was
coming to wait upon the young lady.
Perhaps if he had had an early love-passage, she too had one day hoped
for a different lot than to be wedded to a little gentleman who rapped
his teeth and smiled artificially, who was laboriously polite to the
butler as he slid upstairs into the drawing-room, and profusely civil
to the lady’s-maid, who waited at the bed-room door; for whom her old
patroness used to ring as for a servant, and who came with even more
eagerness; who got up stories, as he sent in draughts, for his
patient’s amusement and his own profit: perhaps she would have chosen a
different man—but she knew, on the other hand, how worthy Pendennis
was, how prudent, how honourable; how good he had been to his mother,
and constant in his care of her; and the upshot of this interview was,
that she, blushing very much, made Pendennis an extremely low curtsey,
and asked leave to—to consider his very kind proposal.
They were married in the dull Bath season, which was the height of the
season in London. And Pendennis having previously, through a
professional friend, M.R.C.S., secured lodgings in Holles Street,
Cavendish Square, took his wife thither in a chaise and pair; conducted
her to the theatres, the Parks, and the Chapel Royal; showed her the
folks going to a drawing-room, and, in a word, gave her all the
pleasures of the town. He likewise left cards upon Lord Pontypool, upon
the Right Honourable the Earl of Bareacres, and upon Sir Pepin and Lady
Ribstone, his earliest and kindest patrons. Bareacres took no notice of
the cards. Pontypool called, admired Mrs. Pendennis, and said Lady
Pontypool would come and see her, which her ladyship did, per proxy of
John her footman, who brought her card, and an invitation to a concert
five weeks off. Pendennis was back in his little one-horse carriage,
dispensing draughts and pills at that time: but the Ribstones asked him
and Mrs. Pendennis to an entertainment, of which Mr. Pendennis bragged
to the last day of his life.
The secret ambition of Mr. Pendennis had always been to be a gentleman.
It takes much time and careful saving for a provincial doctor, whose
gains are not very large, to lay by enough money wherewith to purchase
a house and land: but besides our friend’s own frugality and prudence,
fortune aided him considerably in his endeavour, and brought him to the
point which he so panted to attain. He laid out some money very
advantageously in the purchase of a house and small estate close upon
the village of Clavering before mentioned. Words cannot describe, nor
did he himself ever care to confess to any one, his pride when he found
himself a real landed proprietor, and could walk over acres of which he
was the master. A lucky purchase which he had made of shares in a
copper-mine added very considerably to his wealth, and he realised with
great prudence while this mine was still at its full vogue. Finally, he
sold his business at Bath, to Mr. Parkins, for a handsome sum of ready
money, and for an annuity to be paid to him during a certain number of
years after he had for ever retired from the handling of the mortar and
pestle.
Arthur Pendennis, his son, was eight years old at the time of this
event, so that it is no wonder that the latter, who left Bath and the
surgery so young, should forget the existence of such a place almost
entirely, and that his father’s hands had ever been dirtied by the
compounding of odious pills, or the preparation of filthy plasters. The
old man never spoke about the shop himself, never alluded to it; called
in the medical practitioner of Clavering to attend his family when
occasion arrived; sunk the black breeches and stockings altogether;
attended market and sessions, and wore a bottle-green coat and brass
buttons with drab gaiters, just as if he had been an English gentleman
all his life. He used to stand at his lodge-gate, and see the coaches
come in, and bow gravely to the guards and coachmen as they touched
their hats and drove by. It was he who founded the Clavering Book Club:
and set up the Samaritan Soup and Blanket Society. It was he who
brought the mail, which used to run through Cacklefield before, away
from that village and through Clavering. At church he was equally
active as a vestryman and a worshipper. At market every Thursday, he
went from pen to stall, looked at samples of oats, and munched corn,
felt beasts, punched geese in the breast, and weighed them with a
knowing air, and did business with the farmers at the Clavering Arms,
as well as the oldest frequenter of that house of call. It was now his
shame, as it formerly was his pride, to be called Doctor, and those who
wished to please him always gave him the title of Squire.
Heaven knows where they came from, but a whole range of Pendennis
portraits presently hung round the Doctor’s oak dining-room; Lelys and
Vandykes he vowed all the portraits to be, and when questioned as to
the history of the originals, would vaguely say they were ‘ancestors of
his.’ You could see by his wife’s looks that she disbelieved in these
genealogical legends, for she generally endeavoured to turn the
conversation when he commenced them. But his little boy believed them
to their fullest extent, and Roger Pendennis of Agincourt, Arthur
Pendennis of Crecy, General Pendennis of Blenheim and Oudenarde, were
as real and actual beings for this young gentleman as—whom shall we
say?—as Robinson Crusoe, or Peter Wilkins, or the Seven Champions of
Christendom, whose histories were in his library.
Pendennis’s fortune, which, at the best, was not above eight hundred
pounds a year, did not, with the best economy and management, permit of
his living with the great folks of the county; but he had a decent
comfortable society of the second-best sort. If they were not the
roses, they lived near the roses, as it were, and had a good deal of
the odour of genteel life. They had out their plate, and dined each
other round in the moonlight nights twice a year, coming a dozen miles
to these festivals; and besides the county, the Pendennises had the
society of the town of Clavering, as much as, nay, more than they
liked: for Mrs. Pybus was always poking about Helen’s conservatories,
and intercepting the operation of her soup-tickets and coal-clubs.
Captain Glanders (H. P., 50th Dragoon Guards) was for ever swaggering
about the Squire’s stables and gardens, and endeavouring to enlist him
in his quarrels with the Vicar, with the Postmaster, with the Reverend
F. Wapshot of Clavering Grammar School, for overflogging his son,
Anglesea Glanders,—with all the village in fine. And Pendennis and his
wife often blessed themselves, that their house of Fairoaks was nearly
a mile out of Clavering, or their premises would never have been free
from the prying eyes and prattle of one or other of the male and female
inhabitants there.
Fairoaks lawn comes down to the little river Brawl, and on the other
side were the plantations and woods (as much as were left of them) of
Clavering Park, Sir Francis Clavering, Bart. The park was let out in
pasture and fed down by sheep and cattle, when the Pendennises came
first to live at Fairoaks. Shutters were up in the house; a splendid
freestone palace, with great stairs, statues, and porticos, whereof you
may see a picture in the ‘Beauties of England and Wales.’ Sir Richard
Clavering, Sir Francis’s grandfather, had commenced the ruin of the
family by the building of this palace: his successor had achieved the
ruin by living in it. The present Sir Francis was abroad somewhere; nor
could anybody be found rich enough to rent that enormous mansion,
through the deserted rooms, mouldy clanking halls, and dismal galleries
of which, Arthur Pendennis many a time walked trembling when he was a
boy. At sunset, from the lawn of Fairoaks, there was a pretty sight: it
and the opposite park of Clavering were in the habit of putting on a
rich golden tinge, which became them both wonderfully. The upper
windows of the great house flamed so as to make your eyes wink; the
little river ran off noisily westward, and was lost in a sombre wood,
behind which the towers of the old abbey church of Clavering (whereby
that town is called Clavering St. Mary’s to the present day) rose up in
purple splendour. Little Arthur’s figure and his mother’s, cast long
blue shadows over the grass; and he would repeat in a low voice (for a
scene of great natural beauty always moved the boy, who inherited this
sensibility from his mother) certain lines beginning, “These are thy
glorious works, Parent of Good; Almighty! thine this universal frame,”
greatly to Mrs. Pendennis’s delight. Such walks and conversation
generally ended in a profusion of filial and maternal embraces; for to
love and to pray were the main occupations of this dear woman’s life;
and I have often heard Pendennis say in his wild way, that he felt that
he was sure of going to heaven, for his mother never could be happy
there without him.
As for John Pendennis, as the father of the family, and that sort of
thing, everybody had the greatest respect for him: and his orders were
obeyed like those of the Medes and Persians. His hat was as well
brushed, perhaps, as that of any man in this empire. His meals were
served at the same minute every day, and woe to those who came late, as
little Pen, a disorderly little rascal, sometimes did. Prayers were
recited, his letters were read, his business dispatched, his stables
and garden inspected, his hen-houses and kennel, his barn and pigstye
visited, always at regular hours. After dinner he always had a nap with
the Globe newspaper on his knee, and his yellow bandanna handkerchief
on his face (Major Pendennis sent the yellow handkerchiefs from India,
and his brother had helped in the purchase of his majority, so that
they were good friends now). And so, as his dinner took place at six
o’clock to a minute, and the sunset business alluded to may be supposed
to have occurred at about half-past seven, it is probable that he did
not much care for the view in front of his lawn windows or take any
share in the poetry and caresses which were taking place there.
They seldom occurred in his presence. However frisky they were before,
mother and child were hushed and quiet when Mr. Pendennis walked into
the drawing-room, his newspaper under his arm. And here, while little
Pen, buried in a great chair, read all the books of which he could lay
hold, the Squire perused his own articles in the ‘Gardener’s Gazette,’
or took a solemn hand at picquet with Mrs. Pendennis, or an occasional
friend from the village.
Pendennis usually took care that at least one of his grand dinners
should take place when his brother, the Major, who, on the return of
his regiment from India and New South Wales, had sold out and gone upon
half-pay, came to pay his biennial visit to Fairoaks. “My brother,
Major Pendennis,” was a constant theme of the retired Doctor’s
conversation. All the family delighted in my brother the Major. He was
the link which bound them to the great world of London, and the
fashion. He always brought down the last news of the nobility, and was
in the constant habit of dining with lords and great folks. He spoke of
such with soldierlike respect and decorum. He would say, “My Lord
Bareacres has been good enough to invite me to Bareacres for the
pheasant shooting,” or, “My Lord Steyne is so kind as to wish for my
presence at Stillbrook for the Easter holidays;” and you may be sure
the whereabouts of my brother the Major was carefully made known by
worthy Mr. Pendennis to his friends at the Clavering Reading room, at
Justice-meetings, or at the County-town. Their carriages would come
from ten miles round to call upon Major Pendennis in his visits to
Fairoaks; the fame of his fashion as a man about town was established
throughout the county. There was a talk of his marrying Miss Hunkle, of
Lilybank, old Hunkle the Attorney’s daughter, with at least fifteen
hundred a-year to her fortune: but my brother the Major refused this
negotiation, advantageous as it might seem to most persons. “As a
bachelor,” he said, “nobody cares how poor I am. I have the happiness
to live with people who are so highly placed in the world, that a few
hundreds or thousands a year more or less can make no difference in the
estimation in which they are pleased to hold me. Miss Hunkle, though a
most respectable lady, is not in possession of either the birth or the
manners, which would entitle her to be received into the sphere in
which I have the honour to move. I shall live and die an old bachelor,
John: and your worthy friend, Miss Hunkle, I have no doubt, will find
some more worthy object of her affection, than a worn-out old soldier
on half-pay.” Time showed the correctness of the surmise of the old man
of the world; Miss Hunkle married a young French nobleman, and is now
at this moment living at Lilybank, under the title of Baroness de
Carambole, having been separated from her wild young scapegrace of a
Baron very shortly after their union.
The Major was a great favourite with almost all the little
establishment of Fairoaks. He was as good-natured as he was well bred,
and had a sincere liking and regard for his sister-in-law, whom he
pronounced, and with perfect truth, to be as fine a lady as any in
England, and an honour to the family. Indeed, Mrs. Pendennis’s tranquil
beauty, her natural sweetness and kindness, and that simplicity and
dignity which a perfect purity and innocence are sure to bestow upon a
handsome woman, rendered her quite worthy of her brother’s praises. I
think it is not national prejudice which makes me believe that a
high-bred English lady is the most complete of all Heaven’s subjects in
this world. In whom else do you see so much grace, and so much virtue;
so much faith, and so much tenderness; with such a perfect refinement
and chastity? And by high-bred ladies I don’t mean duchesses and
countesses. Be they ever so high in station, they can be but ladies,
and no more. But almost every man who lives in the world has the
happiness, let us hope, of counting a few such persons amongst his
circle of acquaintance—women, in whose angelical natures, there is
something awful, as well as beautiful, to contemplate; at whose feet
the wildest and fiercest of us must fall down and humble ourselves;—in
admiration of that adorable purity which never seems to do or to think
wrong.
Arthur Pendennis had the good fortune to have a mother endowed with
these happy qualities. During his childhood and youth, the boy thought
of her as little less than an angel,—as a supernatural being, all
wisdom, love, and beauty. When her husband drove her into the county
town, or to the assize balls or concerts there, he would step into the
assembly with his wife on his arm, and look the great folks in the
face, as much as to say, “Look at that, my lord; can any of you show me
a woman like that?” She enraged some country ladies with three times
her money, by a sort of desperate perfection which they found in her.
Miss Pybus said she was cold and haughty; Miss Pierce, that she was too
proud for her station; Mrs. Wapshot, as a doctor of divinity’s lady,
would have the pas of her, who was only the wife of a medical
practitioner. In the meanwhile, this lady moved through the world quite
regardless of all the comments that were made in her praise or
disfavour. She did not seem to know that she was admired or hated for
being so perfect: but carried on calmly through life, saying her
prayers, loving her family, helping her neighbours, and doing her duty.
That even a woman should be faultless, however, is an arrangement not
permitted by nature, which assigns to us mental defects, as it awards
to us headaches, illnesses, or death; without which the scheme of the
world could not be carried on,—nay, some of the best qualities of
mankind could not be brought into exercise. As pain produces or elicits
fortitude and endurance; difficulty, perseverance; poverty, industry
and ingenuity; danger, courage and what not; so the very virtues, on
the other hand, will generate some vices: and, in fine, Mrs. Pendennis
had that vice which Miss Pybus and Miss Pierce discovered in her,
namely, that of pride; which did not vest itself so much in her own
person, as in that of her family. She spoke about Mr. Pendennis (a
worthy little gentleman enough, but there are others as good as he)
with an awful reverence, as if he had been the Pope of Rome on his
throne, and she a cardinal kneeling at his feet, and giving him
incense. The Major she held to be a sort of Bayard among Majors: and as
for her son Arthur she worshipped that youth with an ardour which the
young scapegrace accepted almost as coolly as the statue of the Saint
in Saint Peter’s receives the rapturous osculations which the faithful
deliver on his toe.
This unfortunate superstition and idol-worship of this good woman was
the cause of a great deal of the misfortune which befell the young
gentleman who is the hero of this history, and deserves therefore to be
mentioned at the outset of his story.
Arthur Pendennis’s schoolfellows at the Greyfriars School state that,
as a boy, he was in no ways remarkable either as a dunce or as a
scholar. He did, in fact, just as much as was required of him, and no
more. If he was distinguished for anything it was for verse-writing:
but was his enthusiasm ever so great, it stopped when he had composed
the number of lines demanded by the regulations (unlike young
Swettenham, for instance, who, with no more of poetry in his
composition than Mr. Wakley, yet would bring up a hundred dreary
hexameters to the master after a half-holiday; or young Fluxmore, who
not only did his own verses, but all the fifth form’s besides). He
never read to improve himself out of school-hours, but, on the
contrary, devoured all the novels, plays, and poetry, on which he could
lay his hands. He never was flogged, but it was a wonder how he escaped
the whipping-post. When he had money he spent it royally in tarts for
himself and his friends; he has been known to disburse nine and
sixpence out of ten shillings awarded to him in a single day. When he
had no funds he went on tick. When he could get no credit he went
without, and was almost as happy. He has been known to take a thrashing
for a crony without saying a word; but a blow, ever so slight from a
friend, would make him roar. To fighting he was averse from his
earliest youth, as indeed to physic, the Greek Grammar, or any other
exertion, and would engage in none of them, except at the last
extremity. He seldom if ever told lies, and never bullied little boys.
Those masters or seniors who were kind to him, he loved with boyish
ardour. And though the Doctor, when he did not know his Horace, or
could not construe his Greek play, said that that boy Pendennis was a
disgrace to the school, a candidate for ruin in this world, and
perdition in the next; a profligate who would most likely bring his
venerable father to ruin and his mother to a dishonoured grave, and the
like—yet as the Doctor made use of these compliments to most of the
boys in the place (which has not turned out an unusual number of felons
and pickpockets), little Pen, at first uneasy and terrified by these
charges, became gradually accustomed to hear them; and he has not, in
fact, either murdered his parents, or committed any act worthy of
transportation or hanging up to the present day.
There were many of the upper boys, among the Cistercians with whom
Pendennis was educated, who assumed all the privileges of men long
before they quitted that seminary. Many of them, for example, smoked
cigars—and some had already begun the practice of inebriation. One had
fought a duel with an Ensign in a marching regiment, in consequence of
a row at the theatre—another actually kept a buggy and horse at a
livery stable in Covent Garden, and might be seen driving any Sunday in
Hyde Park with a groom with squared arms and armorial buttons by his
side. Many of the seniors were in love, and showed each other in
confidence poems addressed to, or letters and locks of hair received
from, young ladies—but Pen, a modest and timid youth, rather envied
these than imitated them as yet. He had not got beyond the theory as
yet—the practice of life was all to come. And by the way, ye tender
mothers and sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing
that theory of life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why,
if you could hear those boys of fourteen who blush before mothers and
sneak off in silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among
each other—it would be the women’s turn to blush then. Before he was
twelve years old and if while his mother fancied him an angel of
candour, little Pen had heard talk enough to make him quite awfully
wise upon certain points—and so, Madam, has your pretty little
rosy-cheeked son, who is coming home from school for the ensuing
Christmas holidays. I don’t say that the boy is lost, or that the
innocence has left him which he had from ‘Heaven, which is our home,’
but that the shades of the prison-house are closing very fast over him,
and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him.
Well—Pen had just made his public appearance in a coat with a tail, or
cauda virilis, and was looking most anxiously in his little study-glass
to see if his whiskers were growing, like those of more fortunate
youths his companions; and, instead of the treble voice with which he
used to speak and sing (for his singing voice was a very sweet one, and
he used when little to be made to perform ‘Home, sweet Home,’ ‘My
pretty Page,’ and a French song or two which his mother had taught him,
and other ballads for the delectation of the senior boys), had suddenly
plunged into a deep bass diversified by a squeak, which when he was
called upon to construe in school set the master and scholars
laughing—he was about sixteen years old, in a word, when he was
suddenly called away from his academic studies.
It was at the close of the forenoon school, and Pen had been unnoticed
all the previous part of the morning till now, when the Doctor put him
on to construe in a Greek play. He did not know a word of it, though
little Timmins, his form-fellow, was prompting him with all his might.
Pen had made a sad blunder or two when the awful Chief broke out upon
him.
“Pendennis, sir,” he said, “your idleness is incorrigible and your
stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to
your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your
country. If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all
evil, be really what moralists have represented (and I have no doubt of
the correctness of their opinion), for what a prodigious quantity of
future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed!
Miserable trifler! A boy who construes δε _and_, instead of δε _but_,
at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance,
and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial
ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate. A boy, sir, who does not
learn his Greek play cheats the parent who spends money for his
education. A boy who cheats his parent is not very far from robbing or
forging upon his neighbour. A man who forges on his neighbour pays the
penalty of his crime at the gallows. And it is not such a one that I
pity (for he will be deservedly cut off), but his maddened and
heart-broken parents, who are driven to a premature grave by his
crimes, or, if they live, drag on a wretched and dishonoured old age.
Go on, sir, and I warn you that the very next mistake that you make
shall subject you to the punishment of the rod. Who’s that laughing?
What ill-conditioned boy is there that dares to laugh?” shouted the
Doctor.
Indeed, while the master was making this oration, there was a general
titter behind him in the schoolroom. The orator had his back to the
door of this ancient apartment, which was open, and a gentleman who was
quite familiar with the place, for both Major Arthur and Mr. John
Pendennis had been at the school, was asking the fifth-form boy who
sate by the door for Pendennis. The lad grinning pointed to the culprit
against whom the Doctor was pouring out the thunders of his just
wrath—Major Pendennis could not help laughing. He remembered having
stood under that very pillar where Pen the younger now stood, and
having been assaulted by the Doctor’s predecessor years and years ago.
The intelligence was ‘passed round’ that it was Pendennis’s uncle in an
instant, and a hundred young faces wondering and giggling, between
terror and laughter, turned now to the new-comer and then to the awful
Doctor.
The Major asked the fifth-form boy to carry his card up to the Doctor,
which the lad did with an arch look. Major Pendennis had written on the
card, “I must take A. P. home; his father is very ill.”
As the Doctor received the card, and stopped his harangue with rather a
scared look, the laughter of the boys, half constrained until then,
burst out in a general shout. “Silence!” roared out the Doctor stamping
with his foot. Pen looked up and saw who was his deliverer; the Major
beckoned to him gravely with one of his white gloves, and tumbling down
his books, Pen went across.
The Doctor took out his watch. It was two minutes to one. “We will take
the Juvenal at afternoon school,” he said, nodding to the Captain, and
all the boys understanding the signal gathered up their books and
poured out of the hall.
Young Pen saw by his uncle’s face that something had happened at home.
“Is there anything the matter with my mother?” he said. He could hardly
speak, though, for emotion, and the tears which were ready to start.
“No,” said the Major, “but your father’s very ill. Go and pack your
trunk directly; I have got a postchaise at the gate.”
Pen went off quickly to his boarding-house to do as his uncle bade him;
and the Doctor, now left alone in the schoolroom, came out to shake
hands with his old schoolfellow. You would not have thought it was the
same man. As Cinderella at a particular hour became, from a blazing and
magnificent Princess, quite an ordinary little maid in a grey
petticoat, so, as the clock struck one, all the thundering majesty and
awful wrath of the schoolmaster disappeared.
“There is nothing serious, I hope,” said the Doctor. “It is a pity to
take the boy away unless there is. He is a very good boy, rather idle
and unenergetic, but he is a very honest gentlemanlike little fellow,
though I can’t get him to construe as I wish. Won’t you come in and
have some luncheon? My wife will be very happy to see you.”
But Major Pendennis declined the luncheon. He said his brother was very
ill, had had a fit the day before, and it was a great question if they
should see him alive.
“There’s no other son, is there?” said the Doctor. The Major answered
“No.”
“And there’s a good eh—a good eh—property I believe?” asked the other
in an off-hand way.
“H’m—so so,” said the Major. Whereupon this colloquy came to an end.
And Arthur Pendennis got into the postchaise with his uncle never to
come back to school any more.
As the chaise drove through Clavering, the hostler standing whistling
under the archway of the Clavering Arms, winked the postilion
ominously, as much as to say all was over. The gardener’s wife came and
opened the lodge-gates, and let the travellers through with a silent
shake of the head. All the blinds were down at Fairoaks—the face of the
old footman was as blank when he let them in. Arthur’s face was white
too, with terror more than with grief. Whatever of warmth and love the
deceased man might have had, and he adored his wife and loved and
admired his son with all his heart, he had shut them up within himself;
nor had the boy been ever able to penetrate that frigid outward
barrier. But Arthur had been his father’s pride and glory through life,
and his name the last which John Pendennis had tried to articulate
whilst he lay with his wife’s hand clasping his own cold and clammy
palm, as the flickering spirit went out into the darkness of death, and
life and the world passed away from him.
The little girl, whose face had peered for a moment under the blinds as
the chaise came up, opened the door from the stairs into the hall, and
taking Arthur’s hand silently as he stooped down to kiss her, led him
upstairs to his mother. Old John opened the dining-room door for the
Major. The room was darkened with the blinds down, and surrounded by
all the gloomy pictures of the Pendennises. He drank a glass of wine.
The bottle had been opened for the Squire four days before. His hat was
brushed, and laid on the hall table: his newspapers, and his
letter-bag, with John Pendennis, Esquire, Fairoaks, engraved upon the
brass plate, were there in waiting. The doctor and the lawyer from
Clavering, who had seen the chaise pass through, came up in a gig half
an hour after the Major’s arrival, and entered by the back door. The
former gave a detailed account of the seizure and demise of Mr.
Pendennis, enlarged on his virtues and the estimation in which the
neighbourhood held him; on what a loss he would be to the magistrates’
bench, the County Hospital, etc. Mrs. Pendennis bore up wonderfully, he
said, especially since Master Arthur’s arrival. The lawyer stayed and
dined with Major Pendennis, and they talked business all the evening.
The Major was his brother’s executor, and joint guardian to the boy
with Mrs. Pendennis. Everything was left unreservedly to her, except in
case of a second marriage,—an occasion which might offer itself in the
case of so young and handsome a woman, Mr. Tatham gallantly said, when
different provisions were enacted by the deceased. The Major would of
course take entire superintendence of everything under this most
impressive and melancholy occasion. Aware of this authority, old John
the footman, when he brought Major Pendennis the candle to go to bed,
followed afterwards with the plate-basket; and the next morning brought
him the key of the hall clock—the Squire always used to wind it up of a
Thursday, John said. Mrs. Pendennis’s maid brought him messages from
her mistress. She confirmed the doctor’s report, of the comfort which
Master Arthur’s arrival had caused to his mother.
What passed between that lady and the boy is not of import. A veil
should be thrown over those sacred emotions of love and grief. The
maternal passion is a sacred mystery to me. What one sees symbolised in
the Roman churches in the image of the Virgin Mother with a bosom
bleeding with love, I think one may witness (and admire the Almighty
bounty for) every day. I saw a Jewish lady, only yesterday, with a
child at her knee, and from whose face towards the child there shone a
sweetness so angelical, that it seemed to form a sort of glory round
both. I protest I could have knelt before her too, and adored in her
the Divine beneficence in endowing us with the maternal storge, which
began with our race and sanctifies the history of mankind.
So it was with this, in a word, that Mrs. Pendennis comforted herself
on the death of her husband, whom, however, she always reverenced as
the best, the most upright, wise, high-minded, accomplished, and awful
of men. If the women did not make idols of us, and if they saw us as we
see each other, would life be bearable, or could society go on? Let a
man pray that none of his womankind should form a just estimation of
him. If your wife knew you as you are, neighbour, she would not grieve
much about being your widow, and would let your grave-lamp go out very
soon, or perhaps not even take the trouble to light it. Whereas Helen
Pendennis put up the handsomest of memorials to her husband, and
constantly renewed it with the most precious oil.
As for Arthur Pendennis, after that awful shock which the sight of his
dead father must have produced on him, and the pity and feeling which
such an event no doubt occasioned, I am not sure that in the very
moment of the grief, and as he embraced his mother and tenderly
consoled her, and promised to love her for ever, there was not
springing up in his breast a feeling of secret triumph and exultation.
He was the chief now and lord. He was Pendennis; and all round about
him were his servants and handmaids. “You’ll never send me away,”
little Laura said, tripping by him, and holding his hand. “You won’t
send me to school, will you, Arthur?”
Arthur kissed her and patted her head. No, she shouldn’t go to school.
As for going himself, that was quite out of the question. He had
determined that that part of his life should not be renewed. In the
midst of the general grief, and the corpse still lying above, he had
leisure to conclude that he would have it all holidays for the future,
that he wouldn’t get up till he liked, or stand the bullying of the
Doctor any more, and had made a hundred of such day-dreams and resolves
for the future. How one’s thoughts will travel! and how quickly our
wishes beget them! When he with Laura in his hand went into the kitchen
on his way to the dog-kennel, the fowl-houses, and other his favourite
haunts, all the servants there assembled in great silence with their
friends, and the labouring men and their wives, and Sally Potter who
went with the post-bag to Clavering, and the baker’s man from
Clavering—all there assembled and drinking beer on the melancholy
occasion—rose up on his entrance and bowed or curtseyed to him. They
never used to do so last holidays, he felt at once and with
indescribable pleasure. The cook cried out, “O Lord,” and whispered,
“How Master Arthur do grow!” Thomas, the groom, in the act of drinking,
put down the jug alarmed before his master. Thomas’s master felt the
honour keenly. He went through and looked at the pointers. As Flora put
her nose up to his waistcoat, and Ponto, yelling with pleasure, hurtled
at his chain, Pen patronised the dogs, and said, “Poo Ponto, poo
Flora,” in his most condescending manner. And then he went and looked
at Laura’s hens, and at the pigs, and at the orchard, and at the dairy;
perhaps he blushed to think that it was only last holidays he had in a
manner robbed the great apple-tree, and been scolded by the dairymaid
for taking cream.
They buried John Pendennis, Esquire, “formerly an eminent medical
practitioner at Bath, and subsequently an able magistrate, a benevolent
landlord, and a benefactor to many charities and public institutions in
this neighbourhood and county,” with one of the most handsome funerals
that had been seen since Sir Roger Clavering was buried here, the clerk
said, in the abbey church of Clavering St. Mary’s. A fair marble slab,
from which the above inscription is copied, was erected over the
Fairoaks’ pew in the church. On it you may see the Pendennis coat of
arms, and crest, an eagle looking towards the sun, with the motto ‘nec
tenui penna,’ to the present day. Doctor Portman alluded to the
deceased most handsomely and affectingly, as “our dear departed
friend,” in his sermon next Sunday; and Arthur Pendennis reigned in his
stead.