In which Pendennis appears as a very young Man indeed
Arthur was about sixteen years old, we have said, when he began to
reign; in person (for I see that the artist who is to illustrate this
book, and who makes sad work of the likeness, will never be able to
take my friend off) he had what his friends would call a dumpy, but his
mamma styled a neat little figure. His hair was of a healthy brown
colour, which looks like gold in the sunshine, his face was round,
rosy, freckled, and good-humoured, his whiskers (when those facial
ornaments for which he sighed so ardently were awarded to him by
nature) were decidedly of a reddish hue; in fact, without being a
beauty, he had such a frank, good-natured kind face, and laughed so
merrily at you out of his honest blue eyes, that no wonder Mrs.
Pendennis thought him the pride of the whole county. Between the ages
of sixteen and eighteen he rose from five feet six to five feet eight
inches in height, at which altitude he paused. But his mother wondered
at it. He was three inches taller than his father. Was it possible that
any man could grow to be three inches taller than Mr. Pendennis?
You may be certain he never went back to school; the discipline of the
establishment did not suit him, and he liked being at home much better.
The question of his return was debated, and his uncle was for his going
back. The Doctor wrote his opinion that it was most important for
Arthur’s success in after-life that he should know a Greek play
thoroughly, but Pen adroitly managed to hint to his mother what a
dangerous place Greyfriars was, and what sad wild fellows some of the
chaps there were, and the timid soul, taking alarm at once, acceded to
his desire to stay at home.
Then Pen’s uncle offered to use his influence with His Royal Highness
the Commander-in-Chief, who was pleased to be very kind to him, and
proposed to get Pen a commission in the Foot Guards. Pen’s heart leaped
at this: he had been to hear the band at St. James’s play on a Sunday,
when he went out to his uncle. He had seen Tom Ricketts, of the fourth
form, who used to wear a jacket and trousers so ludicrously tight, that
the elder boys could not forbear using him in the quality of a butt or
‘cockshy’—he had seen this very Ricketts arrayed in crimson and gold,
with an immense bear-skin cap on his head, staggering under the colours
of the regiment. Tom had recognised him and gave him a patronising nod.
Tom, a little wretch whom he had cut over the back with a hockey-stick
last quarter—and there he was in the centre of the square, rallying
round the flag of his country, surrounded by bayonets, crossbelts, and
scarlet, the band blowing trumpets and banging cymbals—talking
familiarly to immense warriors with tufts to their chins and Waterloo
medals. What would not Pen have given to wear such epaulettes and enter
such a service?
But Helen Pendennis, when this point was proposed to her by her son,
put on a face full of terror and alarm. She said she “did not quarrel
with others who thought differently, but that in her opinion a
Christian had no right to make the army a profession. Mr. Pendennis
never, never would have permitted his son to be a soldier. Finally, she
should be very unhappy if he thought of it.” Now Pen would have as soon
cut off his nose and ears as deliberately, and of aforethought malice,
made his mother unhappy; and, as he was of such a generous disposition
that he would give away anything to any one, he instantly made a
present of his visionary red coat and epaulettes and his ardour for
military glory to his mother.
She thought him the noblest creature in the world. But Major Pendennis,
when the offer of the commission was acknowledged and refused, wrote
back a curt and somewhat angry letter to the widow, and thought his
nephew was rather a spooney.
He was contented, however, when he saw the boy’s performances out
hunting at Christmas, when the Major came down as usual to Fairoaks.
Pen had a very good mare, and rode her with uncommon pluck and grace.
He took his fences with great coolness, and yet with judgment, and
without bravado. He wrote to the chaps at school about his top-boots,
and his feats across country. He began to think seriously of a scarlet
coat: and his mother must own that she thought it would become him
remarkably well; though, of course, she passed hours of anguish during
his absence, and daily expected to see him brought home on a shutter.
With these amusements, in rather too great plenty, it must not be
assumed that Pen neglected his studies altogether. He had a natural
taste for reading every possible kind of book which did not fall into
his school-course. It was only when they forced his head into the
waters of knowledge, that he refused to drink. He devoured all the
books at home from Inchbald’s Theatre to White’s Farriery; he ransacked
the neighbouring book-cases. He found at Clavering an old cargo of
French novels, which he read with all his might; and he would sit for
hours perched upon the topmost bar of Doctor Portman’s library steps
with a folio on his knees, whether it were Hakluyt’s Travels, Hobbes’s
Leviathan, Augustini Opera, or Chaucer’s Poems. He and the Vicar were
very good friends, and from his Reverence, Pen learned that honest
taste for port wine which distinguished him through life. And as for
that dear good woman, Mrs. Portman, who was not in the least jealous,
though her Doctor avowed himself in love with Mrs. Pendennis, whom he
pronounced to be by far the finest lady in the county—all her grief
was, as she looked up fondly at Pen perched on the book-ladder, that
her daughter, Minny, was too old for him—as indeed she was—Miss Myra
Portman being at that period only two years younger than Pen’s mother,
and weighing as much as Pen and Mrs. Pendennis together.
Are these details insipid? Look back, good friend, at your own youth,
and ask how was that? I like to think of a well-nurtured boy, brave and
gentle, warm-hearted and loving, and looking the world in the face with
kind honest eyes. What bright colours it wore then, and how you enjoyed
it! A man has not many years of such time. He does not know them whilst
they are with him. It is only when they are passed long away that he
remembers how dear and happy they were.
In order to keep Mr. Pen from indulging in that idleness of which his
friend the Doctor of the Cistercians had prophesied such awful
consequences, Mr. Smirke, Dr. Portman’s curate, was engaged at a
liberal salary, to walk or ride over from Clavering and pass several
hours daily with the young gentleman. Smirke was a man perfectly
faultless at a tea-table, wore a curl on his fair forehead, and tied
his neck-cloth with a melancholy grace. He was a decent scholar and
mathematician, and taught Pen as much as the lad was ever disposed to
learn, which was not much. For Pen had soon taken the measure of his
tutor, who, when he came riding into the court-yard at Fairoaks on his
pony, turned out his toes so absurdly, and left such a gap between his
knees and the saddle, that it was impossible for any lad endowed with a
sense of humour to respect such an equestrian. He nearly killed Smirke
with terror by putting him on his mare, and taking him a ride over a
common, where the county fox-hounds (then hunted by that staunch old
sportsman, Mr. Hardhead, of Dumplingbeare) happened to meet. Mr.
Smirke, on Pen’s mare, Rebecca (she was named after Pen’s favourite
heroine, the daughter of Isaac of York), astounded the hounds as much
as he disgusted the huntsman, laming one of the former by persisting in
riding amongst the pack, and receiving a speech from the latter, more
remarkable for energy of language, than any oration he had ever heard
since he left the bargemen on the banks of Isis.
Smirke confided to his pupil his poems both Latin and English; and
presented to Mrs. Pendennis a volume of the latter, printed at Clapham,
his native place. The two read the ancient poets together, and rattled
through them at a pleasant rate, very different from that steady
grubbing pace with which the Cistercians used to go over the classic
ground, scenting out each word as they went, and digging up every root
in the way. Pen never liked to halt, but made his tutor construe when
he was at fault, and thus galloped through the Iliad and the Odyssey,
the tragic playwriters, writers, and the charming wicked Aristophanes
(whom he vowed to be the greatest poet of all). But he went at such a
pace that, though he certainly galloped through a considerable extent
of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after-life, and had only
such a vague remembrance of his early classic course as a man has in
the House of Commons, let us say, who still keeps up two or three
quotations; or a reviewer who, just for decency’s sake, hints at a
little Greek. Our people are the most prosaic in the world, but the
most faithful; and with curious reverence we keep up and transmit, from
generation to generation, the superstition of what we call the
education of a gentleman.
Besides the ancient poets, you may be sure Pen read the English with
great gusto. Smirke sighed and shook his head sadly both about Byron
and Moore. But Pen was a sworn fire-worshipper and a Corsair; he had
them by heart, and used to take little Laura into the window and say,
“Zuleika, I am not thy brother,” in tones so tragic that they caused
the solemn little maid to open her great eyes still wider. She sat,
until the proper hour for retirement, sewing at Mrs. Pendennis’s knee,
and listening to Pen reading out to her of nights without comprehending
one word of what he read.
He read Shakspeare to his mother (which she said she liked, but
didn’t), and Byron, and Pope, and his favourite Lalla Rookh, which
pleased her indifferently. But as for Bishop Heber, and Mrs. Hemans
above all, this lady used to melt right away, and be absorbed into her
pocket-handkerchief, when Pen read those authors to her in his kind
boyish voice. The ‘Christian Year’ was a book which appeared about that
time. The son and the mother whispered it to each other with awe—faint,
very faint, and seldom in after-life Pendennis heard that solemn
church-music: but he always loved the remembrance of it, and of the
times when it struck on his heart, and he walked over the fields full
of hope and void of doubt, as the church-bells rang on Sunday morning.
It was at this period of his existence, that Pen broke out in the
Poets’ Corner of the County Chronicle, with some verses with which he
was perfectly well satisfied. His are the verses signed ‘NEP.,’
addressed ‘To a Tear;’ ‘On the Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo;’
‘To Madame Caradori singing at the Assize Meetings;’ ‘On Saint
Bartholomew’s Day’ (a tremendous denunciation of Popery, and a solemn
warning to the people of England to rally against emancipating the
Roman Catholics), etc., etc.—all which masterpieces, Mrs. Pendennis no
doubt keeps to this day, along with his first socks, the first cutting
of his hair, his bottle, and other interesting relics of his infancy.
He used to gallop Rebecca over the neighbouring Dumpling Downs, or into
the county town, which, if you please, we shall call Chatteris,
spouting his own poems, and filled with quite a Byronic afflatus as he
thought.
His genius at this time was of a decidedly gloomy cast. He brought his
mother a tragedy, in which, though he killed sixteen people before the
second act, it made her laugh so, that he thrust the masterpiece into
the fire in a pet. He projected an epic poem in blank verse, ‘Cortez,
or the Conqueror of Mexico, and the Inca’s Daughter.’ He wrote part of
‘Seneca, or the Fatal Bath,’ and ‘Ariadne in Naxos;’ classical pieces,
with choruses and strophes and antistrophes, which sadly puzzled poor
Mrs. Pendennis; and began a ‘History of the Jesuits,’ in which he
lashed that Order with tremendous severity, and warned his Protestant
fellow-countrymen of their machinations. His loyalty did his mother’s
heart good to witness. He was a staunch, unflinching Church-and-King
man in those days; and at the election, when Sir Giles Beanfield stood
on the Blue interest, against Lord Trehawk, Lord Eyrie’s son, a Whig
and a friend of Popery, Arthur Pendennis, with an immense bow for
himself, which his mother made, and with a blue ribbon for Rebecca,
rode alongside of the Reverend Doctor Portman, on his grey mare Dowdy,
and at the head of the Clavering voters, whom the Doctor brought up to
plump for the Protestant Champion.
On that day Pen made his first speech at the Blue Hotel: and also, it
appears, for the first time in his life—took a little more wine than
was good for him. Mercy! what a scene it was at Fairoaks, when he rode
back at ever so much o’clock at night. What moving about of lanterns in
the court-yard and stables, though the moon was shining out; what a
gathering of servants, as Pen came home, clattering over the bridge and
up the stableyard, with half a score of the Clavering voters yelling
after him the Blue song of the election.
He wanted them all to come in and have some wine—some very good
Madeira—some capital Madeira—John, go and get some Madeira,—and there
is no knowing what the farmers would have done, had not Madam Pendennis
made her appearance in a white wrapper, with a candle—and scared those
zealous Blues so by the sight of her pale handsome face, that they
touched their hats and rode off.
Besides these amusements and occupations in which Mr. Pen indulged,
there was one which forms the main business and pleasure of youth, if
the poets tell us aright, whom Pen was always studying; and this young
fellow’s heart was so ardent, and his imagination so eager, that it is
not to be expected he should long escape the passion to which we
allude, and which, ladies, you have rightly guessed to be that of Love.
Pen sighed for it first in secret, and, like the love-sick swain in
Ovid, opened his breast and said, “Aura, veni.” What generous youth is
there that has not courted some such windy mistress in his time?
Yes, Pen began to feel the necessity of a first love—of a consuming
passion—of an object on which he could concentrate all those vague
floating fancies under which he sweetly suffered—of a young lady to
whom he could really make verses, and whom he could set up and adore,
in place of those unsubstantial Ianthes and Zuleikas to whom he
addressed the outpourings of his gushing muse. He read his favourite
poems over and over again, he called upon Alma Venus the delight of
gods and men, he translated Anacreon’s odes, and picked out passages
suitable to his complaint from Waller, Dryden, Prior, and the like.
Smirke and he were never weary, in their interviews, of discoursing
about love. The faithless tutor entertained him with sentimental
conversations in place of lectures on algebra and Greek; for Smirke was
in love too. Who could help it, being in daily intercourse with such a
woman? Smirke was madly in love (as far as such a mild flame as Mr.
Smirke’s may be called madness) with Mrs. Pendennis. That honest lady,
sitting down below stairs teaching little Laura to play the piano, or
devising flannel petticoats for the poor round about her, or otherwise
busied with the calm routine of her modest and spotless Christian life,
was little aware what storms were brewing in two bosoms upstairs in the
study—in Pen’s, as he sate in his shooting jacket, with his elbows on
the green study-table, and his hands clutching his curly brown hair,
Homer under his nose,—and in worthy Mr. Smirke’s, with whom he was
reading. Here they would talk about Helen and Andromache. “Andromache’s
like my mother,” Pen used to avouch; “but I say, Smirke, by Jove I’d
cut off my nose to see Helen;” and he would spout certain favourite
lines which the reader will find in their proper place in the third
book. He drew portraits of her—they are extant still—with straight
noses and enormous eyes, and ‘Arthur Pendennis delineavit et pinxit’
gallantly written underneath.
As for Mr. Smirke he naturally preferred Andromache. And in consequence
he was uncommonly kind to Pen. He gave him his Elzevir Horace, of which
the boy was fond, and his little Greek Testament which his own mamma at
Clapham had purchased and presented to him. He bought him a silver
pencil-case; and in the matter of learning let him do just as much or
as little as ever he pleased. He always seemed to be on the point of
unbosoming himself to Pen: nay, he confessed to the latter that he had
a—an attachment, an ardently cherished attachment, about which
Pendennis longed to hear, and said, “Tell us, old chap, is she
handsome? has she got blue eyes or black?” But Doctor Portman’s curate,
heaving a gentle sigh, cast up his eyes to the ceiling, and begged Pen
faintly to change the conversation. Poor Smirke! He invited Pen to dine
at his lodgings over Madame Fribsby’s, the milliner’s, in Clavering;
and once when it was raining, and Mrs. Pendennis, who had driven in her
pony-chaise into Clavering with respect to some arrangements, about
leaving off mourning probably, was prevailed upon to enter the curate’s
apartments, he sent out for pound-cakes instantly. The sofa on which
she sate became sacred to him from that day: and he kept flowers in the
glass which she drank from ever after.
As Mrs. Pendennis was never tired of hearing the praises of her son, we
may be certain that this rogue of a tutor neglected no opportunity of
conversing with her upon that subject. It might be a little tedious to
him to hear the stories about Pen’s generosity, about his bravery in
fighting the big naughty boy, about his fun and jokes, about his
prodigious skill in Latin, music, riding, etc., but what price would he
not pay to be in her company? and the widow, after these conversations,
thought Mr. Smirke a very pleasing and well-informed man. As for her
son, she had not settled in her mind whether he was to be Senior
Wrangler and Archbishop of Canterbury, or Double First Class at Oxford,
and Lord Chancellor. That all England did not possess his peer, was a
fact about which there was, in her mind, no manner of question.
A simple person, of inexpensive habits, she began forthwith to save,
and, perhaps, to be a little parsimonious, in favour of her boy. There
were no entertainments, of course, at Fairoaks, during the year of her
weeds. Nor, indeed, did the Doctor’s silver dish-covers, of which he
was so proud, and which were flourished all over with the arms of the
Pendennises, and surmounted with their crest, come out of the
plate-chests again for long, long years. The household was diminished,
and its expenses curtailed. There was a very blank anchorite repast
when Pen dined from home: and he himself headed the remonstrance from
the kitchen regarding the deteriorated quality of the Fairoaks beer.
She was becoming miserly for Pen. Indeed, who ever accused women of
being just? They are always sacrificing themselves or somebody for
somebody else’s sake.
There happened to be no young woman in the small circle of friends who
were in the widow’s intimacy whom Pendennis could by any possibility
gratify by endowing her with the inestimable treasure of a heart which
he was longing to give away. Some young fellows in this predicament
bestow their young affections upon Dolly, the dairymaid, or cast the
eyes of tenderness upon Molly, the blacksmith’s daughter. Pen thought a
Pendennis much too grand a personage to stoop so low. He was too
high-minded for a vulgar intrigue, and, at the idea of an intrigue or a
seduction, had he ever entertained it, his heart would have revolted as
from the notion of any act of baseness or dishonour. Miss Minny Portman
was too old, too large, and too fond of reading ‘Rollin’s Ancient
History.’ The Miss Boardbacks, Admiral Boardback’s daughters (of St.
Vincent’s, or Fourth of June House, as it was called), disgusted Pen
with the London airs which they brought into the country, from
Gloucester Place, where they passed the season, and looked down upon
Pen as a chit. Captain Glanders’s (H.P., 50th Dragoon Guards) three
girls were in brown-holland pinafores as yet, with the ends of their
hair-plaits tied up in dirty pink ribbon. Not having acquired the art
of dancing, the youth avoided such chances as he might have had of
meeting with the fair sex at the Chatteris’ Assemblies; in fine, he was
not in love, because there was nobody at hand to fall in love with. And
the young monkey used to ride out, day after day, in quest, of
Dulcinea; and peep into the pony-chaises and gentlefolks’ carriages, as
they drove along the broad turnpike roads, with a heart beating within
him, and a secret tremor and hope that she might be in that yellow
postchaise coming swinging up the hill, or one of those three girls in
beaver bonnets in the back seat of the double gig, which the fat old
gentleman in black was driving, at four miles an hour. The postchaise
contained a snuffy old dowager of seventy, with a maid, her
contemporary. The three girls in the beaver bonnets were no handsomer
than the turnips that skirted the roadside. Do as he might, and ride
where he would, the fairy princess that he was to rescue and win, had
not yet appeared to honest Pen.
Upon these points he did not discourse to his mother. He had a world of
his own. What generous, ardent, imaginative soul has not a secret
pleasure-place in which it disports? Let no clumsy prying or dull
meddling of ours try to disturb it in our children. Actaeon was a brute
for wanting to push in where Diana was bathing. Leave him occasionally
alone, my good madam, if you have a poet for a child. Even your
admirable advice may be a bore sometimes. You are faultless; but it
does not follow that everybody in your family is to think exactly like
yourself. Yonder little child may have thoughts too deep even for your
great mind, and fancies so coy and timid that they will not bare
themselves when your ladyship sits by.
Helen Pendennis by the force of sheer love divined a great number of
her son’s secrets. But she kept these things in her heart (if we may so
speak), and did not speak of them. Besides, she had made up her mind
that he was to marry little Laura, who would be eighteen when Pen was
six-and-twenty: and had finished his college career, and had made his
grand tour, and was settled either in London, astonishing all the
metropolis by his learning and eloquence at the bar, or better still in
a sweet country parsonage surrounded with hollyhocks and roses, close
to a delightful romantic ivy-covered church, from the pulpit of which
Pen would utter the most beautiful sermons ever preached.
While these natural sentiments were waging war and trouble in honest
Pen’s bosom, it chanced one day that he rode into Chatteris, for the
purpose of carrying to the County Chronicle a tremendous and thrilling
poem for the next week’s paper; and putting up his horse according to
custom, at the stables of the George Hotel there, he fell in with an
old acquaintance. A grand black tandem, with scarlet wheels, came
rattling into the inn yard, as Pen stood there in converse with the
hostler about Rebecca; and the voice of the driver called out, “Hallo,
Pendennis, is that you?” in a loud patronising manner. Pen had some
difficulty in recognising under the broad-brimmed hat and the vast
great-coats and neckcloths, with which the new-comer was habited, the
person and figure of his quondam schoolfellow, Mr. Foker.
A year’s absence had made no small difference in that gentleman. A
youth who had been deservedly whipped a few months previously, and who
spent his pocket-money on tarts and hardbake, now appeared before Pen
in one of those costumes to which the public consent, that I take to be
quite as influential in this respect as ‘Johnson’s Dictionary,’ has
awarded the title of “Swell.’ He had a bull-dog between his legs, and
in his scarlet shawl neckcloth was a pin representing another bull-dog
in gold: he wore a fur waistcoat laced over with gold chains; a green
cutaway coat with basket-buttons, and a white upper-coat ornamented
with cheese-plate buttons, on each of which was engraved some stirring
incident of the road or the chase; all which ornaments set off this
young fellow’s figure to such advantage, that you would hesitate to say
which character in life he most resembled, and whether he was a boxer
en goguette, or a coachman in his gala suit.
“Left that place for good, Pendennis?” Mr. Foker said, descending from
his landau and giving Pendennis a finger.
“Yes, this year—or more,” Pen said.
“Beastly old hole,” Mr. Foker remarked. “Hate it. Hate the Doctor: hate
Towzer, the second master; hate everybody there. Not a fit place for a
gentleman.”
“Not at all,” said Pen, with an air of the utmost consequence.
“By gad, sir, I sometimes dream, now, that the Doctor’s walking into
me,” Foker continued (and Pen smiled as he thought that he himself had
likewise fearful dreams of this nature). “When I think of the diet
there, by gad, sir, I wonder how I stood it. Mangy mutton, brutal beef;
pudding on Thursdays and Sundays, and that fit to poison you. Just look
at my leader—did you ever see a prettier animal? Drove over from
Baymouth. Came the nine mile in two-and-forty minutes. Not bad going,
sir.”
“Are you stopping at Baymouth, Foker?” Pendennis asked.
“I’m coaching there,” said the other, with a nod.
“What?” asked Pen, and in a tone of such wonder, that Foker burst out
laughing, and said, “He was blowed if he didn’t think Pen was such a
flat as not to know what coaching meant.”
“I’m come down with a coach from Oxford. A tutor, don’t you see, old
boy? He’s coaching me, and some other men, for the little go. Me and
Spavin have the drag between us. And I thought I’d just tool over and
go to the play. Did you ever see Rowkins do the hornpipe?” and Mr.
Foker began to perform some steps of that popular dance in the inn
yard, looking round for the sympathy of his groom and the stable-men.
Pen thought he would like to go to the play too: and could ride home
afterwards, as there was a moonlight. So he accepted Foker’s invitation
to dinner, and the young men entered the inn together, where Mr. Foker
stopped at the bar, and called upon Miss Rincer, the landlady’s fair
daughter, who presided there, to give him a glass of ‘his mixture.’
Pen and his family had been known at the George ever since they came
into the country; and Mr. Pendennis’s carriages and horses always put
up there when he paid a visit to the county town. The landlady dropped
the heir of Fairoaks a very respectful curtsey, and complimented him
upon his growth and manly appearance, and asked news of the family at
Fairoaks, and of Doctor Portman and the Clavering people, to all of
which questions the young gentleman answered with much affability. But
he spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Rincer with that sort of good nature with
which a young Prince addresses his father’s subjects; never dreaming
that those bonnes gens were his equals in life.
Mr. Foker’s behaviour was quite different. He inquired for Rincer and
the cold in his nose, told Mrs. Rincer a riddle, asked Miss Rincer when
she would be ready to marry him, and paid his compliments to Miss
Brett, the other young lady in the bar, all in a minute of time, and
with a liveliness and facetiousness which set all these ladies in a
giggle; and he gave a cluck, expressive of great satisfaction, as he
tossed off his mixture which Miss Rincer prepared and handed to him.
“Have a drop,” said he to Pen, “it’s recommended to me by the faculty
as a what-do-you-call-’em—a stomatic, old boy. Give the young one a
glass, R., and score it up to yours truly.”
Poor Pen took a glass, and everybody laughed at the face which he made
as he put it down—gin, bitters, and some other cordial was the compound
with which Mr. Foker was so delighted as to call it by the name of
Foker’s own. As Pen choked, sputtered, and made faces, the other took
occasion to remark to Mr. Rincer that the young fellow was green, very
green, but that he would soon form him; and then they proceeded to
order dinner—which Mr. Foker determined should consist of turtle and
venison; cautioning the landlady to be very particular about icing the
wine.
Then Messrs. Foker and Pen strolled down the High Street together—the
former having a cigar in his mouth, which he had drawn out of a case
almost as big as a portmanteau. He went in to replenish it at Mr.
Lewis’s, and talked to that gentleman for a while, sitting down on the
counter: he then looked in at the fruiterer’s, to see the pretty girl
there, to whom he paid compliments similar to those before addressed to
the bar at the George; then they passed the County Chronicle office,
for which Pen had his packet ready, in the shape of ‘Lines to Thyrza,’
but poor Pen did not like to put the letter into the editor’s box while
walking in company with such a fine gentleman as Mr. Foker. They met
heavy dragoons of the regiment always quartered at Chatteris; and
stopped and talked about the Baymouth balls, and what a pretty girl was
Miss Brown, and what a dem fine woman Mrs. Jones was. It was in vain
that Pen recalled to his own mind what a stupid ass Foker used to be at
school—how he could scarcely read, how he was not cleanly in his
person, and notorious for his blunders and dulness. Mr. Foker was no
more like a gentleman now than in his school days: and yet Pen felt a
secret pride in strutting down High Street with a young fellow who
owned tandems, talked to officers, and ordered turtle and champagne for
dinner. He listened, and with respect too, to Mr. Foker’s accounts of
what the men did at the University of which Mr. F. was an ornament, and
encountered a long series of stories about boat-racing, bumping,
College grass-plats, and milk-punch—and began to wish to go up himself
to College to a place where there were such manly pleasures and
enjoyments. Farmer Gurnett, who lives close by Fairoaks, riding by at
this minute and touching his hat to Pen, the latter stopped him, and
sent a message to his mother to say that he had met with an old
schoolfellow, and should dine in Chatteris.
The two young gentlemen continued their walk, and were passing round
the Cathedral Yard, where they could hear the music of the afternoon
service (a music which always exceedingly impressed and affected Pen),
but whither Mr. Foker came for the purpose of inspecting the
nursery-maids who frequent the Elms Walk there, and who are uncommonly
pretty at Chatteris, and here they strolled until with a final burst of
music the small congregation was played out.
Old Doctor Portman was one of the few who came from the venerable gate.
Spying Pen, he came and shook him by the hand, and eyed with wonder
Pen’s friend, from whose mouth and cigar clouds of fragrance issued,
which curled round the Doctor’s honest face and shovel hat.
“An old schoolfellow of mine, Mr. Foker,” said Pen. The Doctor said
“H’m”: and scowled at the cigar. He did not mind a pipe in his study,
but the cigar was an abomination to the worthy gentleman.
“I came up on Bishop’s business,” the Doctor said. “We’ll ride home,
Arthur, if you like?”
“I—I’m engaged to my friend here,” Pen answered.
“You had better come home with me,” said the Doctor.
“His mother knows he’s out, sir,” Mr. Foker remarked; “don’t she,
Pendennis?”
“But that does not prove that he had not better come home with me,” the
Doctor growled, and he walked off with great dignity.
“Old boy don’t like the weed, I suppose,” Foker said. “Ha! who’s
here?—here’s the General, and Bingley, the manager. How do, Cos? How
do, Bingley?”
“How does my worthy and gallant young Foker?” said the gentleman
addressed as the General; and who wore a shabby military cape with a
mangy collar, and a hat cocked very much over one eye.
“Trust you are very well, my very dear sir,” said the other gentleman,
“and that the Theatre Royal will have the honour of your patronage
to-night. We perform ‘The Stranger,’ in which your humble servant
will—-”
“Can’t stand you in tights and Hessians, Bingley,” young Mr. Foker
said. On which the General, with the Irish accent, said, “But I think
ye’ll like Miss Fotheringay, in Mrs. Haller, or me name’s not Jack
Costigan.”
Pen looked at these individuals with the greatest interest. He had
never seen an actor before; and he saw Dr. Portman’s red face looking
over the Doctor’s shoulder, as he retreated from the Cathedral Yard,
evidently quite dissatisfied with the acquaintances into whose hands
Pen had fallen.
Perhaps it would have been much better for him had he taken the
parson’s advice and company home. But which of us knows his fate?