CHAPTER II. THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY TO TRY THE STRENGTH OF THE SYSTEM
CHAPTER III. THE MAGIAN CONFLICT
CHAPTER IV. ARSON
CHAPTER V. ADRIAN PLIES HIS HOOK
CHAPTER VI. JUVENILE STRATAGEMS
CHAPTER VII. DAPHNE’S BOWER
CHAPTER VIII. THE BITTER CUP
CHAPTER IX. A FINE DISTINCTION
CHAPTER X. RICHARD PASSES THROUGH HIS PRELIMINARY ORDEAL
CHAPTER XI. THE LAST ACT OF THE BAKEWELL COMEDY IS CLOSED IN A LETTER
CHAPTER XII. THE BLOSSOMING SEASON
CHAPTER XIII. THE MAGNETIC AGE
CHAPTER XIV. AN ATTRACTION
CHAPTER XV. FERDINAND AND MIRANDA
CHAPTER XVI. UNMASKING OF MASTER RIPTON THOMPSON
CHAPTER XVII. GOOD WINE AND GOOD BLOOD
CHAPTER XVIII. THE SYSTEM ENCOUNTERS THE WILD OATS SPECIAL PLEA
CHAPTER XIX. A DIVERSION PLAYED ON A PENNY WHISTLE
CHAPTER XX. CELEBRATES THE TIME-HONOURED TREATMENT OF A DRAGON BY THE HERO
CHAPTER XXI. RICHARD IS SUMMONED TO TOWN TO HEAR A SERMON
CHAPTER XXII. INDICATES THE APPROACHES OF FEVER
CHAPTER XXIII. CRISIS IN THE APPLE-DISEASE
CHAPTER XXIV. OF THE SPRING PRIMROSE AND THE AUTUMNAL
CHAPTER XXV. IN WHICH THE HERO TAKES A STEP
CHAPTER XXVI. RECORDS THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF THE HERO
CHAPTER XXVII. CONTAINS AN INTERCESSION FOR THE HEROINE
CHAPTER XXVIII. PREPARATIONS FOR ACTION WERE CONDUCTED UNDER THE APRIL OF LOVERS
CHAPTER XXIX. IN WHICH THE LAST ACT OF THE COMEDY TAKES THE PLACE OF THE FIRST
CHAPTER XXX. CELEBRATES THE BREAKFAST
CHAPTER XXXI. THE PHILOSOPHER APPEARS IN PERSON
CHAPTER XXXII. PROCESSION OF THE CAKE
CHAPTER XXXIII. NURSING THE DEVIL
CHAPTER XXXIV. CONQUEST OF AN EPICURE
CHAPTER XXXV. CLARE’S MARRIAGE
CHAPTER XXXVI. A DINNER-PARTY AT RICHMOND
CHAPTER XXXVII. MRS. BERRY ON MATRIMONY
CHAPTER XXXVIII. AN ENCHANTRESS
CHAPTER XXXIX. THE LITTLE BIRD AND THE FALCON: A BERRY TO THE RESCUE!
CHAPTER XL. CLARE’S DIARY
CHAPTER XLI. AUSTIN RETURNS
CHAPTER XLII. NATURE SPEAKS
CHAPTER XLIII. AGAIN THE MAGIAN CONFLICT
CHAPTER XLIV. THE LAST SCENE
CHAPTER XLV. LADY BLANDISH TO AUSTIN WENTWORTH
CHAPTER I
Some years ago a book was published under the title of “The Pilgrim’s
Scrip.” It consisted of a selection of original aphorisms by an
anonymous gentleman, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised heart to
the world.
He made no pretension to novelty. “Our new thoughts have thrilled dead
bosoms,” he wrote; by which avowal it may be seen that youth had
manifestly gone from him, since he had ceased to be jealous of the
ancients. There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for those
days of intellectual coxcombry, when ideas come to us affecting the
embraces of virgins, and swear to us they are ours alone, and no one
else have they ever visited: and we believe them.
For an example of his ideas of the sex he said:
“I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.”
Some excitement was produced in the bosoms of ladies by so monstrous a
scorn of them.
One adventurous person betook herself to the Heralds’ College, and
there ascertained that a Griffin between two Wheatsheaves, which stood
on the title-page of the book, formed the crest of Sir Austin Absworthy
Bearne Feverel, Baronet, of Raynham Abbey, in a certain Western county
folding Thames: a man of wealth and honour, and a somewhat lamentable
history.
The outline of the baronet’s story was by no means new. He had a wife,
and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was a beauty;
his friend was a sort of poet. His wife had his whole heart, and his
friend all his confidence. When he selected Denzil Somers from among
his college chums, it was not on account of any similarity of
disposition between them, but from his intense worship of genius, which
made him overlook the absence of principle in his associate for the
sake of such brilliant promise. Denzil had a small patrimony to lead
off with, and that he dissipated before he left college; thenceforth he
was dependent upon his admirer, with whom he lived, filling a nominal
post of bailiff to the estates, and launching forth verse of some
satiric and sentimental quality; for being inclined to vice, and
occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, he was of course a
sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of
human nature. His earlier poems, published under the pseudonym of
Diaper Sandoe, were so pure and bloodless in their love passages, and
at the same time so biting in their moral tone, that his reputation was
great among the virtuous, who form the larger portion of the English
book-buying public. Election-seasons called him to ballad-poetry on
behalf of the Tory party. Diaper possessed undoubted fluency, but did
little, though Sir Austin was ever expecting much of him.
A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in
moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now
that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off,
and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not
instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household
collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel,
when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her
husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his
guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.
“For I am not the first who found
The name of Mary fatal!”
says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper’s.
Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He
had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one,
and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and
sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In
fact, he had been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it
is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon
bitterness.
The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of
an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but
at the man whose name she bore.
After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was
left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save
a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as
poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned
every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable
transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit
under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his
equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world’s
fair aspect for him.
In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved
his wonted demeanor, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs. Doria
Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his
Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of
thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and
private, was, that the light thing who had taken flight was but a
feather on her brother’s Feverel-heart, and his ordinary course of life
would be resumed. There are times when common men cannot bear the
weight of just so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his brothers, thought
him immensely improved by his misfortune, if the loss of such a person
could be so designated; and seeing that Hippias received in consequence
free quarters at Raynham, and possession of the wing of the Abbey she
had inhabited, it is profitable to know his thoughts. If the baronet
had given two or three blazing dinners in the great hall he would have
deceived people generally, as he did his relatives and intimates. He
was too sick for that: fit only for passive acting.
The nursemaid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure darkening a
lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so used to the sight
as never to wake with a start. One night she was strangely aroused by a
sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside the cot in his long black
cloak and travelling cap. His fingers shaded a lamp, and reddened
against the fitful darkness that ever and anon went leaping up the
wall. She could hardly believe her senses to see the austere gentleman,
dead silent, dropping tear upon tear before her eyes. She lay
stone-still in a trance of terror and mournfulness, mechanically
counting the tears as they fell, one by one. The hidden face, the fall
and flash of those heavy drops in the light of the lamp he held, the
upright, awful figure, agitated at regular intervals like a piece of
clockwork by the low murderous catch of his breath: it was so piteous
to her poor human nature that her heart began wildly palpitating.
Involuntarily the poor girl cried out to him, “Oh, sir!” and fell
a-weeping. Sir Austin turned the lamp on her pillow, and harshly bade
her go to sleep, striding from the room forthwith. He dismissed her
with a purse the next day.
Once, when he was seven years old, the little fellow woke up at night
to see a lady bending over him. He talked of this the next day, but it
was treated as a dream; until in the course of the day his uncle
Algernon was driven home from Lobourne cricket-ground with a broken
leg. Then it was recollected that there was a family ghost; and, though
no member of the family believed in the ghost, none would have given up
a circumstance that testified to its existence; for to possess a ghost
is a distinction above titles.
Algernon Feverel lost his leg, and ceased to be a gentleman in the
Guards. Of the other uncles of young Richard, Cuthbert, the sailor,
perished in a spirited boat expedition against a slaving negro chief up
the Niger. Some of the gallant lieutenant’s trophies of war decorated
the little boy’s play-shed at Raynham, and he bequeathed his sword to
Richard, whose hero he was. The diplomatist and beau, Vivian, ended his
flutterings from flower to flower by making an improper marriage, as is
the fate of many a beau, and was struck out of the list of visitors.
Algernon generally occupied the baronet’s disused town-house, a
wretched being, dividing his time between horse and card exercise:
possessed, it was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost
his balance by losing his leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle.
At least, whenever he and his brother Hippias got together, they never
failed to try whether one leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a
puritan as Sir Austin was in his habits, he was too good a host, and
too thorough a gentleman, to impose them upon his guests. The brothers,
and other relatives, might do as they would while they did not disgrace
the name, and then it was final: they must depart to behold his
countenance no more.
Algernon Feverel was a simple man, who felt, subsequent to his
misfortune, as he had perhaps dimly fancied it before, that his career
lay in his legs, and was now irrevocably cut short. He taught the boy
boxing, and shooting, and the arts of fence, and superintended the
direction of his animal vigour with a melancholy vivacity. The
remaining energies of Algernon’s mind were devoted to animadversions on
swift bowling. He preached it over the county, struggling through
laborious literary compositions, addressed to sporting newspapers, on
the Decline of Cricket. It was Algernon who witnessed and chronicled
young Richard’s first fight, which was with young Tom Blaize of
Belthorpe Farm, three years the boy’s senior.
Hippias Feverel was once thought to be the genius of the family. It was
his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach; and, as one
is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged in a
perpetual contention with his dinner, Hippias forsook his prospects at
the Bar, and, in the embraces of dyspepsia, compiled his ponderous work
on the Fairy Mythology of Europe. He had little to do with the Hope of
Raynham beyond what he endured from his juvenile tricks.
A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt Grantley, who had money to
bequeath to the heir, occupied with Hippias the background of the house
and shared her candles with him. These two were seldom seen till the
dinner hour, for which they were all day preparing, and probably all
night remembering, for the Eighteenth Century was an admirable
trencherman, and cast age aside while there was a dish on the table.
Mrs. Doris Foray was the eldest of the three sisters of the baronet, a
florid affable woman, with fine teeth, exceedingly fine light wavy
hair, a Norman nose, and a reputation for understanding men; and that,
with these practical creatures, always means the art of managing them.
She had married an expectant younger son of a good family, who deceased
before the fulfilment of his prospects; and, casting about in her mind
the future chances of her little daughter and sole child, Clare, she
marked down a probability. The far sight, the deep determination, the
resolute perseverance of her sex, where a daughter is to be provided
for and a man to be overthrown, instigated her to invite herself to
Raynham, where, with that daughter, she fixed herself.
The other two Feverel ladies were the wife of Colonel Wentworth and the
widow of Mr. Justice Harley: and the only thing remarkable about them
was that they were mothers of sons of some distinction.
Austin Wentworth’s story was of that wretched character which to be
comprehended, that justice should be dealt him, must be told out and
openly; which no one dares now do.
For a fault in early youth, redeemed by him nobly, according to his
light, he was condemned to undergo the world’s harsh judgment: not for
the fault—for its atonement.
“—Married his mother’s housemaid,” whispered Mrs. Doria, with a ghastly
look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments, which he was
reputed to entertain. “‘The compensation for Injustice,’ says the
‘Pilgrim’s Scrip,’ is, that in that dark Ordeal we gather the worthiest
around us.”
And the baronet’s fair friend, Lady Blandish, and some few true men and
women, held Austin Wentworth high.
He did not live with his wife; and Sir Austin, whose mind was bent on
the future of our species, reproached him with being barren to
posterity, while knaves were propagating.
The principal characteristic of the second nephew, Adrian Harley, was
his sagacity. He was essentially the wise youth, both in counsel and in
action.
“In action,” the “Pilgrim’s Scrip” observes, “Wisdom goes by
majorities.”
Adrian had an instinct for the majority, and, as the world invariably
found him enlisted in its ranks, his appellation of wise youth was
acquiesced in without irony.
The wise youth, then, had the world with him, but no friends. Nor did
he wish for those troublesome appendages of success. He caused himself
to be required by people who could serve him; feared by such as could
injure. Not that he went out of the way to secure his end, or risked
the expense of a plot. He did the work as easily as he ate his daily
bread. Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged
out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our modern notions. To
satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character, was the
wise youth’s problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and
Horace, and the society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped
him to accept humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic
procession, with laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter
of mortals also? Adrian had his laugh in his comfortable corner. He
possessed peculiar attributes of a heathen God. He was a disposer of
men: he was polished, luxurious, and happy—at their cost. He lived in
eminent self-content, as one lying on soft cloud, lapt in sunshine. Nor
Jove, nor Apollo, cast eye upon the maids of earth with cooler fire of
selection, or pursued them in the covert with more sacred impunity. And
he enjoyed his reputation for virtue as something additional. Stolen
fruits are said to be sweet; undeserved rewards are exquisite.
The best of it was, that Adrian made no pretences. He did not solicit
the favourable judgment of the world. Nature and he attempted no other
concealment than the ordinary mask men wear. And yet the world would
proclaim him moral, as well as wise, and the pleasing converse every
way of his disgraced cousin Austin.
In a word, Adrian Harley had mastered his philosophy at the early age
of one-and-twenty. Many would be glad to say the same at that age
twice-told: they carry in their breasts a burden with which Adrian’s
was not loaded. Mrs. Doria was nearly right about his heart. A singular
mishap (at his birth, possibly, or before it) had unseated that organ,
and shaken it down to his stomach, where it was a much lighter, nay, an
inspiring weight, and encouraged him merrily onward. Throned there it
looked on little that did not arrive to gratify it. Already that region
was a trifle prominent in the person of the wise youth, and carried, as
it were, the flag of his philosophical tenets in front of him. He was
charming after dinner, with men or with women: delightfully sarcastic:
perhaps a little too unscrupulous in his moral tone, but that his moral
reputation belied him, and it must be set down to generosity of
disposition.
Such was Adrian Harley, another of Sir Austin’s intellectual
favourites, chosen from mankind to superintend the education of his son
at Raynham. Adrian had been destined for the Church. He did not enter
into Orders. He and the baronet had a conference together one day, and
from that time Adrian became a fixture in the Abbey. His father died in
his promising son’s college term, bequeathing him nothing but his legal
complexion, and Adrian became stipendiary officer in his uncle’s
household.
A playfellow of Richard’s occasionally, and the only comrade of his age
that he ever saw, was Master Ripton Thompson, the son of Sir Austin’s
solicitor, a boy without a character.
A comrade of some description was necessary, for Richard was neither to
go to school nor to college. Sir Austin considered that the schools
were corrupt, and maintained that young lads might by parental
vigilance be kept pretty secure from the Serpent until Eve sided with
him: a period that might be deferred, he said. He had a system of
education for his son. How it worked we shall see.