Pendennis of Boniface
Our friend Pen was not sorry when his Mentor took leave of the young
gentleman on the second day after the arrival of the pair in Oxbridge,
and we may be sure that the Major on his part was very glad to have
discharged his duty, and to have the duty over. More than three months
of precious time had that martyr of a Major given up to his nephew—Was
ever selfish man called upon to make a greater sacrifice? Do you know
many men or Majors who would do as much? A man will lay down his head,
or peril his life for his honour, but let us be shy how we ask him to
give up his ease or his heart’s desire. Very few of us can bear that
trial. Say, worthy reader, if thou hast peradventure a beard, wouldst
thou do as much? I will not say that a woman will not. They are used to
it: we take care to accustom them to sacrifices but, my good sir, the
amount of self-denial which you have probably exerted through life,
when put down to your account elsewhere, will not probably swell the
balance on the credit side much. Well, well, there is no use in
speaking of such ugly matters, and you are too polite to use a vulgar
to quoque. But I wish to state once for all that I greatly admire the
Major for his conduct during the past quarter, and think that he has
quite a right to be pleased at getting a holiday. Foker and Pen saw him
off in the coach, and the former young gentleman gave particular orders
to the coachman to take care of that gentleman inside. It pleased the
elder Pendennis to have his nephew in the company of a young fellow who
would introduce him to the best set of the university. The Major rushed
off to London and thence to Cheltenham, from which Watering-place he
descended upon some neighbouring great houses, whereof the families
were not gone abroad, and where good shooting and company was to be
had.
A quarter of the space which custom has awarded to works styled the
Serial Nature, has been assigned to the account of one passage in Pen’s
career, and it is manifest that the whole of his adventures cannot be
treated at a similar length, unless some descendant of the chronicler
of Pen’s history should take up the pen at his decease, and continue
the narrative for the successors of the present generation of readers.
We are not about to go through the young fellow’s academical career
with, by any means, a similar minuteness. Alas, the life of such boys
does not bear telling altogether. I wish it did. I ask you, does yours?
As long as what we call our honour is clear, I suppose your mind is
pretty easy. Women are pure, but not men. Women are unselfish, but not
men. And I would not wish to say of poor Arthur Pendennis that he was
worse than his neighbours, only that his neighbours are bad for the
most part. Let us have the candour to own as much at least. Can you
point out ten spotless men of your acquaintance? Mine is pretty large,
but I can’t find ten saints in the list.
During the first term of Mr. Pen’s academical life, he attended
classical and mathematical lectures with tolerable assiduity; but
discovering before very long time that he had little taste or genius
for the pursuing of the exact sciences, and being perhaps rather
annoyed that one or two very vulgar young men, who did not even use
straps to their trousers so as to cover the abominably thick and coarse
shoes and stockings which they wore, beat him completely in the
lecture-room, he gave up his attendance at that course, and announced
to his fond parent that he proposed to devote himself exclusively to
the cultivation of Greek and Roman Literature.
Mrs. Pendennis was, for her part, quite satisfied that her darling boy
should pursue that branch of learning for which he had the greatest
inclination; and only besought him not to ruin his health by too much
study, for she had heard the most melancholy stories of young students
who, by over-fatigue, had brought on brain-fevers and perished untimely
in the midst of their university career. And Pen’s health, which was
always delicate, was to be regarded, as she justly said, beyond all
considerations or vain honours. Pen, although not aware of any lurking
disease which was likely to end his life, yet kindly promised his mamma
not to sit up reading too late of nights, and stuck to his word in this
respect with a great deal more tenacity of resolution than he exhibited
upon some other occasions, when perhaps he was a little remiss.
Presently he began too to find that he learned little good in the
classical lecture. His fellow-students there were too dull, as in
mathematics they were too learned for him. Mr. Buck, the tutor, was no
better a scholar than many a fifth-form boy at Grey Friars; might have
some stupid humdrum notions about the metre and grammatical
construction of a passage of Aeschylus or Aristophanes, but had no more
notion of the poetry than Mrs. Binge, his bed-maker; and Pen grew weary
of hearing the dull students and tutor blunder through a few lines of a
play, which he could read in a tenth part of the time which they gave
to it. After all, private reading, as he began to perceive, was the
only study which was really profitable to a man; and he announced to
his mamma that he should read by himself a great deal more, and in
public a great deal less. That excellent woman knew no more about Homer
than she did about Algebra, but she was quite contented with Pen’s
arrangements regarding his course of studies, and felt perfectly
confident that her dear boy would get the place which he merited.
Pen did not come home until after Christmas, a little to the fond
mother’s disappointment, and Laura’s, who was longing for him to make a
fine snow fortification, such as he had made three winters before. But
he was invited to Logwood, Lady Agnes Foker’s, where there were private
theatricals, and a gay Christmas party of very fine folks, some of them
whom Major Pendennis would on no account have his nephew neglect.
However, he stayed at home for the last three weeks of the vacation,
and Laura had the opportunity of remarking what a quantity of fine new
clothes he brought with him, and his mother admired his improved
appearance and manly and decided tone.
He did not come home at Easter; but when he arrived for the long
vacation, he brought more smart clothes; appearing in the morning in
wonderful shooting jackets, with remarkable buttons; and in the evening
in gorgeous velvet waistcoats, with richly-embroidered cravats, and
curious linen. And as she pried about his room, she saw, oh, such a
beautiful dressing-case, with silver mountings, and a quantity of
lovely rings and jewellery. And he had a new French watch and gold
chain, in place of the big old chronometer, with its bunch of jingling
seals, which had hung from the fob of John Pendennis, and by the
second-hand of which the defunct doctor had felt many a patient’s pulse
in his time. It was but a few months back Pen had longed for this
watch, which he thought the most splendid and august timepiece in the
world; and just before he went to college, Helen had taken it out of
her trinket-box (where it had remained unwound since the death of her
husband) and given it to Pen with a solemn and appropriate little
speech respecting his father’s virtues and the proper use of time. This
portly and valuable chronometer Pen now pronounced to be out of date,
and, indeed, made some comparisons between it and a warming-pan, which
Laura thought disrespectful, and he left the watch in a drawer, in the
company of soiled primrose gloves, cravats which had gone out of
favour, and of that other school watch which has once before been
mentioned in this history. Our old friend, Rebecca, Pen pronounced to
be no long up to his weight, and swapped her away for another and more
powerful horse, for which he had to pay rather a heavy figure. Mr.
Pendennis gave the boy the money for the new horse; and Laura cried
when Rebecca was fetched away.
Also Pen brought a large box of cigars branded Colorados, Afrancesados,
Telescopios, Fudson Oxford Street, or by some such strange titles, and
began to consume these not only about the stables and green-houses,
where they were very good for Helen’s plants, but in his own study, of
which practice his mother did not at first approve. But he was at work
upon a prize-poem, he said, and could not compose without his cigar,
and quoted the late lamented Lord Byron’s lines in favour of the custom
of smoking. As he was smoking to such good purpose, his mother could
not of course refuse permission: in fact, the good soul coming into the
room one day in the midst of Pen’s labours (he was consulting a novel
which had recently appeared, for the cultivation of the light
literature of his own country as well as of foreign nations became
every student)—Helen, we say, coming into the room and finding Pen on
the sofa at this work, rather than disturb him went for a light-box and
his cigar-case to his bedroom which was adjacent, and actually put the
cigar into his mouth and lighted the match at which he kindled it. Pen
laughed, and kissed his mother’s hand as it hung fondly over the back
of the sofa. “Dear old mother,” he said, “if I were to tell you to burn
the house down, I think you would do it.” And it is very likely that
Mr. Pen was right, and that the foolish woman would have done almost as
much for him as he said.
Besides the works of English “light literature” which this diligent
student devoured, he brought down boxes of the light literature of the
neighbouring country of France: into the leaves of which when Helen
dipped, she read such things as caused her to open her eyes with
wonder. But Pen showed her that it was not he who made the books,
though it was absolutely necessary that he should keep up his French by
an acquaintance with the most celebrated writers of the day, and that
it was as clearly his duty to read the eminent Paul de Kock, as to
study Swift or Moliere. And Mrs. Pendennis yielded with a sigh of
perplexity. But Miss Laura was warned off the books, both by his
anxious mother, and that rigid moralist Mr. Arthur Pendennis himself,
who, however he might be called upon to study every branch of
literature in order to form his mind and to perfect his style, would by
no means prescribe such a course of reading to a young lady whose
business in life was very different.
In the course of this long vacation Mr. Pen drank up the bin of claret
which his father had laid in, and of which we have heard the son remark
that there was not a headache in a hogshead; and this wine being
exhausted, he wrote for a further supply to “his wine merchants,”
Messrs. Binney and Latham of Mark Lane, London: from whom, indeed, old
Doctor Portman had recommended Pen to get a supply of port and sherry
on going to college. “You will have, no doubt, to entertain your young
friends at Boniface with wine-parties,” the honest rector had remarked
to the lad. “They used to be customary at college in my time, and I
would advise you to employ an honest and respectable house in London
for your small stock of wine, rather than to have recourse to the
Oxbridge tradesmen, whose liquor, if I remember rightly, was both
deleterious in quality and exorbitant in price.” And the obedient young
gentleman took the Doctor’s advice, and patronised Messrs. Binney and
Latham at the rector’s suggestion.
So when he wrote orders for a stock of wine to be sent down to the
cellars at Fairoaks, he hinted that Messrs. B. and L. might send in his
university account for wine at the same time with the Fairoaks bill.
The poor widow was frightened at the amount. But Pen laughed at her
old-fashioned views, said that the bill was moderate, that everybody
drank claret and champagne now, and, finally, the widow paid, feeling
dimly that the expenses of her household were increasing considerably,
and that her narrow income would scarce suffice to meet them. But they
were only occasional. Pen merely came home for a few weeks at the
vacation. Laura and she might pinch when he was gone. In the brief time
he was with them, ought they not to make him happy?
Arthur’s own allowances were liberal all this time; indeed, much more
so than those of the sons of far more wealthy men. Years before, the
thrifty and affectionate John Pendennis, whose darling project it had
ever been to give his son a university education, and those advantages
of which his own father’s extravagance had deprived him, had begun
laying by a store of money which he called Arthur’s Education Fund.
Year after year in his book his executors found entries of sums vested
as A. E. F., and during the period subsequent to her husband’s decease,
and before Pen’s entry at college, the widow had added sundry sums to
this fund, so that when Arthur went up to Oxbridge it reached no
inconsiderable amount. Let him be liberally allowanced, was Major
Pendennis’s maxim. Let him make his first entree into the world as a
gentleman, and take his place with men of good rank and station: after
giving it to him, it will be his own duty to hold it. There is no such
bad policy as stinting a boy—or putting him on a lower allowance than
his fellows. Arthur will have to face the world and fight for himself
presently. Meanwhile we shall have procured for him good friends,
gentlemanly habits, and have him well backed and well trained against
the time when the real struggle comes. And these liberal opinions the
Major probably advanced both because they were just, and because he was
not dealing with his own money.
Thus young Pen, the only son of an estated country gentleman, with a
good allowance, and a gentlemanlike bearing and person, looked to be a
lad of much more consequence than he was really; and was held by the
Oxbridge authorities, tradesmen, and undergraduates, as quite a young
buck and member of the aristocracy. His manner was frank, brave, and
perhaps a little impertinent, as becomes a high-spirited youth. He was
perfectly generous and free-handed with his money, which seemed pretty
plentiful. He loved joviality, and had a good voice for a song.
Boat-racing had not risen in Pen’s time to the fureur which, as we are
given to understand, it has since attained in the university; and
riding and tandem-driving were the fashions of the ingenuous youth. Pen
rode well to hounds, appeared in pink, as became a young buck, and, not
particularly extravagant in equestrian or any other amusement, yet
managed to run up a fine bill at Nile’s, the livery-stable keeper, and
in a number of other quarters. In fact, this lucky young gentleman had
almost every taste to a considerable degree. He was very fond of books
of all sorts: Doctor Portman had taught him to like rare editions, and
his own taste led him to like beautiful bindings. It was marvellous
what tall copies, and gilding, and marbling, and blind-tooling, the
booksellers and binders put upon Pen’s bookshelves. He had a very fair
taste in matters of art, and a keen relish for prints of a high
school—none of your French Opera Dancers, or tawdry Racing Prints, such
as had delighted the simple eyes of Mr. Spicer, his predecessor—but
your Stranges, and Rembrandt etchings, and Wilkies before the letter,
with which his apartments were furnished presently in the most perfect
good taste, as was allowed in the university, where this young fellow
got no small reputation. We have mentioned that he exhibited a certain
partiality for rings, jewellery, and fine raiment of all sorts; and it
must be owned that Mr. Pen, during his time at the university, was
rather a dressy man, and loved to array himself in splendour. He and
his polite friends would dress themselves out with as much care in
order to go and dine at each other’s rooms, as other folks would who
were going to enslave a mistress. They said he used to wear rings over
his kid gloves, which he always denies; but what follies will not youth
perpetrate with its own admirable gravity and simplicity? That he took
perfumed baths is a truth; and he used to say that he took them after
meeting certain men of a very low set in hall.
In Pen’s second year, when Miss Fotheringay made her chief hit in
London, and scores of prints were published of her, Pen had one of
these hung in his bedroom, and confided to the men of his set how
awfully, how wildly, how madly, how passionately, he had loved that
woman. He showed them in confidence the verses that he had written to
her, and his brow would darken, his eyes roll, his chest heave with
emotion as he recalled that fatal period of his life, and described the
woes and agonies which he had suffered. The verses were copied out,
handed about, sneered at, admired, passed from coterie to coterie.
There are few things which elevate a lad in the estimation of his
brother boys, more than to have a character for a great and romantic
passion. Perhaps there is something noble in it at all times—among very
young men it is considered heroic—Pen was pronounced a tremendous
fellow. They said he had almost committed suicide: that he had fought a
duel with a baronet about her. Freshmen pointed him out to each other.
As at the promenade time at two o’clock he swaggered out of college,
surrounded by his cronies, he was famous to behold. He was elaborately
attired. He would ogle the ladies who came to lionise the university,
and passed before him on the arms of happy gownsmen, and give his
opinion upon their personal charms, or their toilettes, with the
gravity of a critic whose experience entitled him to speak with
authority. Men used to say that they had been walking with Pendennis,
and were as pleased to be seen in his company as some of us would be if
we walked with a duke down Pall Mall. He and the Proctor capped each
other as they met, as if they were rival powers, and the men hardly
knew which was the greater.
In fact, in the course of his second year, Arthur Pendennis had become
one of the men of fashion in the university. It is curious to watch
that facile admiration, and simple fidelity of youth. They hang round a
leader; and wonder at him, and love him, and imitate him. No generous
boy ever lived, I suppose, that has not had some wonderment of
admiration for another boy; and Monsieur Pen at Oxbridge had his
school, his faithful band of friends and his rivals. When the young men
heard at the haberdashers’ shops that Mr. Pendennis, of Boniface, had
just ordered a crimson satin-cravat, you would see a couple of dozen
crimson satin cravats in Main Street in the course of the week—and
Simon, the Jeweller, was known to sell no less than two gross of
Pendennis pins, from a pattern which the young gentleman had selected
in his shop.
Now if any person with an arithmetical turn of mind will take the
trouble to calculate what a sum of money it would cost a young man to
indulge freely in all the above propensities which we have said Mr. Pen
possessed, it will be seen that a young fellow, with such liberal
tastes and amusements, must needs in the course of two or three years
spend or owe a very handsome sum of money. We have said our friend Pen
had not a calculating turn. No one propensity of his was outrageously
extravagant; and it is certain that Paddington’s tailor’s account;
Guttlebury’s cook’s bill for dinners; Dillon Tandy’s bill with Finn,
the print seller, for Raphael-Morgheus and Landseer proofs, and
Wormall’s dealings with Parkton, the great bookseller, for Aldine
editions, black-letter folios, and richly illuminated Missals of the
XVI. Century; and Snaffle’s or Foker’s score with Nile the horsedealer,
were, each and all of them, incomparably greater than any little bills
which Mr. Pen might run up with the above-mentioned tradesmen. But
Pendennis of Boniface had the advantage over all these young gentlemen,
his friends and associates, of a universality of taste: and whereas
young Lord Paddington did not care twopence for the most beautiful
print, or to look into any gilt frame that had not a mirror within it;
and Guttlebury did not mind in the least how he was dressed, and had an
aversion for horse exercise, nay a terror of it; and Snaffle never read
any printed works but the ‘Racing Calendar’ or ‘Bell’s Life,’ or cared
for any manuscript except his greasy little scrawl of a
betting-book:—our Catholic-minded young friend occupied himself in
every one of the branches of science or pleasure above-mentioned, and
distinguished himself tolerably in each.
Hence young Pen got a prodigious reputation in the university, and was
hailed as a sort of Crichton; and as for the English verse prize, in
competition for which we have seen him busily engaged at Fairoaks,
Jones of Jesus carried it that year certainly, but the undergraduates
thought Pen’s a much finer poem, and he had his verses printed at his
own expense, and distributed in gilt morocco covers amongst his
acquaintance. I found a copy of it lately in a dusty corner of Mr.
Pen’s bookcases, and have it before me this minute, bound up in a
collection of old Oxbridge tracts, university statutes, prize-poems by
successful and unsuccessful candidates, declamations recited in the
college chapel, speeches delivered at the Union Debating Society, and
inscribed by Arthur with his name and college, Pendennis—Boniface; or
presented to him by his affectionate friend Thompson or Jackson, the
author. How strange the epigraphs look in those half-boyish hands, and
what a thrill the sight of the documents gives one after the lapse of a
few lustres! How fate, since that time, has removed some, estranged
others, dealt awfully with all! Many a hand is cold that wrote those
kindly memorials, and that we pressed in the confident and generous
grasp of youthful friendship. What passions our friendships were in
those old days, how artless and void of doubt! How the arm you were
never tired of having linked in yours under the fair college avenues or
by the river side, where it washes Magdalen Gardens, or Christ Church
Meadows, or winds by Trinity and King’s, was withdrawn of necessity,
when you entered presently the world, and each parted to push and
struggle for himself through the great mob on the way through life! Are
we the same men now that wrote those inscriptions—that read those
poems? that delivered or heard those essays and speeches so simple, so
pompous, so ludicrously solemn; parodied so artlessly from books, and
spoken with smug chubby faces, and such an admirable aping of wisdom
and gravity? Here is the book before me: it is scarcely fifteen years
old. Here is Jack moaning with despair and Byronic misanthropy, whose
career at the university was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is Tom’s
daring Essay in defence of suicide and of republicanism in general,
apropos of the death of Roland and the Girondins—Tom’s, who wears the
starchest tie in all the diocese, and would go to Smithfield rather
than eat a beefsteak on a Friday in Lent. Here is Bob of the ——
Circuit, who has made a fortune in Railroad Committees, and whose
dinners are so good—bellowing out with Tancred and Godfrey, “On to the
breach, ye soldiers of the cross, Scale the red wall and swim the
choking foss. Ye dauntless archers, twang your cross-bows well; On,
bill and battle-axe and mangonel! Ply battering-ram and hurtling
catapult, Jerusalem is ours—id Deus vult.” After which comes a
mellifluous description of the gardens of Sharon and the maids of
Salem, and a prophecy that roses shall deck the entire country of
Syria, and a speedy reign of peace be established—all in undeniably
decasyllabic lines, and the queerest aping of sense and sentiment and
poetry. And there are Essays and Poems along with these grave parodies,
and boyish exercises (which are at once so frank and false and
mirthful, yet, somehow, so mournful) by youthful hands, that shall
never write more. Fate has interposed darkly, and the young voices are
silent, and the eager brains have ceased to work. This one had genius
and a great descent, and seemed to be destined for honours which now
are of little worth to him: that had virtue, learning, genius—every
faculty and endowment which might secure love, admiration, and worldly
fame: an obscure and solitary churchyard contains the grave of many
fond hopes, and the pathetic stone which bids them farewell—I saw the
sun shining on it in the fall of last year, and heard the sweet village
choir raising anthems round about. What boots whether it be Westminster
or a little country spire which covers your ashes, or if, a few days
sooner or later, the world forgets you?
Amidst these friends, then, and a host more, Pen passed more than two
brilliant and happy years of his life. He had his fill of pleasure and
popularity. No dinner- or supper-party was complete without him; and
Pen’s jovial wit, and Pen’s songs, and dashing courage and frank and
manly bearing, charmed all the undergraduates, and even disarmed the
tutors who cried out at his idleness, and murmured about his
extravagant way of life. Though he became the favourite and leader of
young men who were much his superiors in wealth and station, he was
much too generous to endeavour to propitiate them by any meanness or
cringing on his own part, and would not neglect the humblest man of his
acquaintance in order to curry favour with the richest young grandee in
the university. His name is still remembered at the Union Debating
Club, as one of the brilliant orators of his day. By the way, from
having been an ardent Tory in his freshman’s year, his principles took
a sudden turn afterwards, and he became a liberal of the most violent
order. He avowed himself a Dantonist, and asserted that Louis the
Sixteenth was served right. And as for Charles the First, he vowed that
he would chop off that monarch’s head with his own right hand were he
then in the room at the Union Debating Club, and had Cromwell no other
executioner for the traitor. He and Lord Magnus Charters, the Marquis
of Runnymede’s son, before-mentioned, were the most truculent
republicans of their day.
There are reputations of this sort made, quite independent of the
collegiate hierarchy, in the republic of gownsmen. A man may be famous
in the Honour-lists and entirely unknown to the undergraduates: who
elect kings and chieftains of their own, whom they admire and obey, as
negro-gangs have private black sovereigns in their own body, to whom
they pay an occult obedience, besides that which they publicly profess
for their owners and drivers. Among the young ones Pen became famous
and popular: not that he did much, but there was a general
determination that he could do a great deal if he chose. “Ah, if
Pendennis of Boniface would but try,” the men said, “he might do
anything.” He was backed for the Greek Ode won by Smith of Trinity;
everybody was sure he would have the Latin hexameter prize which Brown
of St. John’s, however, carried off, and in this way one university
honour after another was lost by him, until, after two or three
failures, Mr. Pen ceased to compete. But he got a declamation prize in
his own college, and brought home to his mother and Laura at Fairoaks a
set of prize-books begilt with the college arms, and so big,
well-bound, and magnificent, that these ladies thought there had been
no such prize ever given in a college before as this of Pen’s, and that
he had won the very largest honour which Oxbridge was capable of
awarding.
As vacation after vacation and term after term passed away without the
desired news that Pen had sate for any scholarship or won any honour,
Doctor Portman grew mightily gloomy in his behaviour towards Arthur,
and adopted a sulky grandeur of deportment towards him, which the lad
returned by a similar haughtiness. One vacation he did not call upon
the Doctor at all, much to his mother’s annoyance, who thought that it
was a privilege to enter the Rectory-house at Clavering, and listened
to Dr. Portman’s antique jokes and stories, though ever so often
repeated, with unfailing veneration. “I cannot stand the Doctor’s
patronising air”, Pen said. “He’s too kind to me, a great deal
fatherly. I have seen in the world better men than him, and am not
going to bore myself by listening to his dull old stories and drinking
his stupid old port wine.” The tacit feud between Pen and the Doctor
made the widow nervous, so that she too avoided Portman, and was afraid
to go to the Rectory when Arthur was at home.
One Sunday in the last long vacation, the wretched boy pushed his
rebellious spirit so far as not to go to church, and he was seen at the
gate of the Clavering Arms smoking a cigar, in the face of the
congregation as it issued from St. Mary’s. There was an awful sensation
in the village society, Portman prophesied Pen’s ruin after that, and
groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal.
So did Helen tremble in her heart, and little Laura—Laura had grown to
be a fine young stripling by this time, graceful and fair, clinging
round Helen and worshipping her, with a passionate affection. Both of
these women felt that their boy was changed. He was no longer the
artless Pen of old days, so brave, so artless, so impetuous, and
tender. His face looked careworn and haggard, his voice had a deeper
sound, and tones more sarcastic. Care seemed to be pursuing him; but he
only laughed when his mother questioned him, and parried her anxious
queries with some scornful jest. Nor did he spend much of his vacations
at home; he went on visits to one great friend or another, and scared
the quiet pair at Fairoaks by stories of great houses whither he had
been invited; and by talking of lords without their titles.
Honest Harry Foker, who had been the means of introducing Arthur
Pendennis to that set of young men at the university, from whose
society and connexions Arthur’s uncle expected that the lad would get
so much benefit; who had called for Arthur’s first song at his first
supper-party; and who had presented him at the Barmecide Club, where
none but the very best men of Oxbridge were admitted (it consisted in
Pen’s time of six noblemen, eight gentlemen-pensioners, and twelve of
the most select commoners of the university), soon found himself left
far behind by the young freshman in the fashionable world of Oxbridge,
and being a generous and worthy fellow, without a spark of envy in his
composition, was exceedingly pleased at the success of his young
protege, and admired Pen quite as much as any of the other youth did.
It was he who followed Pen now, and quoted his sayings; learned his
songs, and retailed them at minor supper-parties, and was never weary
of hearing them from the gifted young poet’s own mouth—for a good deal
of the time which Mr. Pen might have employed much more advantageously
in the pursuit of the regular scholastic studies, was given up to the
composition of secular ballads, which he sang about at parties
according to university wont.
It had been as well for Arthur if the honest Foker had remained for
some time at college, for, with all his vivacity, he was a prudent
young man, and often curbed Pen’s propensity to extravagance: but
Foker’s collegiate career did not last very long after Arthur’s
entrance at Boniface. Repeated differences with the university
authorities caused Mr. Foker to quit Oxbridge in an untimely manner. He
would persist in attending races on the neighbouring Hungerford Heath,
in spite of the injunctions of his academic superiors. He never could
be got to frequent the chapel of the college with that regularity of
piety which Alma Mater demands from her children; tandems, which are
abominations in the eyes of the heads and tutors, were Foker’s greatest
delight, and so reckless was his driving and frequent the accidents and
upsets out of his drag, that Pen called taking a drive with him taking
the “Diversions of Purley;” finally, having a dinner-party at his rooms
to entertain some friends from London, nothing would satisfy Mr. Foker
but painting Mr. Buck’s door vermilion, in which freak he was caught by
the proctors; and although young Black Strap, the celebrated negro
fighter, who was one of Mr. Foker’s distinguished guests, and was
holding the can of paint while the young artist operated on the door,
knocked down two of the proctor’s attendants and performed prodigies of
valour, yet these feats rather injured than served Foker, whom the
proctor knew very well and who was taken with the brush in his hand,
and who was summarily convened and sent down from the university.
The tutor wrote a very kind and feeling letter to Lady Agnes on the
subject, stating that everybody was fond of the youth; that he never
meant harm to any mortal creature; that he for his own part would have
been delighted to pardon the harmless little boyish frolic, had not its
unhappy publicity rendered it impossible to look the freak over, and
breathing the most fervent wishes for the young fellow’s welfare—wishes
no doubt sincere, for Foker, as we know, came of a noble family on his
mother’s side, and on the other was heir to a great number of thousand
pounds a year.
“It don’t matter,” said Foker, talking over the matter with Pen,—“a
little sooner or a little later, what is the odds? I should have been
plucked for my little-go again, I know I should—that Latin I cannot
screw into my head, and my mamma’s anguish would have broke out next
term. The Governor will blow like an old grampus, I know he will,—well,
we must stop till he gets his wind again. I shall probably go abroad
and improve my mind with foreign travel. Yes, parly-voo’s the ticket.
It’ly, and that sort of thing. I’ll go to Paris and learn to dance and
complete my education. But it’s not me I’m anxious about, Pen. As long
as people drink beer I don’t care,—it’s about you I’m doubtful, my boy.
You’re going too fast, and can’t keep up the pace, I tell you. It’s not
the fifty you owe me,—pay it or not when you like,—but it’s the
every-day pace, and I tell you it will kill you. You’re livin’ as if
there was no end to the money in the stockin’ at home. You oughtn’t to
give dinners, you ought to eat ’em. Fellows are glad to have you. You
oughtn’t to owe horse bills, you ought to ride other chaps’ nags. You
know no more about betting than I do about Algebra: the chaps will win
your money as sure as you sport it. Hang me if you are not trying
everything. I saw you sit down to ecarte last week at Trumpington’s,
and taking your turn with the bones after Ringwood’s supper. They’ll
beat you at it, Pen, my boy, even if they play on the square, which I
don’t say they don’t, nor which I don’t say they do, mind. But I won’t
play with ’em. You’re no match for ’em. You ain’t up to their weight.
It’s like little Black Strap standing up to Tom Spring,—the Black’s a
pretty fighter but, Law bless you, his arm ain’t long enough to touch
Tom,—and I tell you, you’re going it with fellers beyond your weight.
Look here—If you’ll promise me never to bet nor touch a box nor a card,
I’ll let you off the two ponies.”
But Pen, laughingly, said, “that though it wasn’t convenient to him to
pay the two ponies at that moment, he by no means wished to be let off
any just debts he owed;” and he and Foker parted, not without many dark
forebodings on the latter’s part with regard to his friend, who Harry
thought was travelling speedily on the road to ruin.
“One must do at Rome as Rome does,” Pen said, in a dandified manner,
jingling some sovereigns in his waistcoat-pocket. “A little quiet play
at ecarte can’t hurt a man who plays pretty well—I came away fourteen
sovereigns richer from Ringwood’s supper, and, gad! I wanted the
money.”—And he walked off, after having taken leave of poor Foker, who
went away without any beat of drum, or offer to drive the coach out of
Oxbridge, to superintend a little dinner which he was going to give at
his own rooms in Boniface, about which dinners, the cook of the
college, who had a great respect for Mr. Pendennis, always took
especial pains for his young favourite.