THE HERO INTRODUCED TO OUR READER’S NOTICE.--DIALOGUE BETWEEN HIMSELF
AND HIS FATHER.--PERCY GODOLPHIN’s CHARACTER AS A BOY.--THE CATASTROPHE
OF HIS SCHOOL LIFE.
“Percy, remember that it is to-morrow you will return to school,” said
Mr. Godolphin to his only son.
Percy pouted, and after a momentary silence replied, “No, father, I
think I shall go to Mr. Saville’s. He has asked me to spend a month with
him; and he says rightly that I shall learn more with him than at Dr.
Shallowell’s, where I am already head of the sixth form.”
“Mr. Saville is a coxcomb, and you are another!” replied the father,
who, dressed in an old flannel dressing-gown, with a worn velvet cap
on his head, and cowering gloomily over a wretched fire, seemed no bad
personification of that mixture of half-hypochondriac, half-miser, which
he was in reality. “Don’t talk to me of going to town, sir, or--”
“Father,” interrupted Percy, in a cool and nonchalant tone, as he
folded his arms, and looked straight and shrewdly on the paternal
face--“father, let us understand each other. My schooling, I suppose, is
rather an expensive affair?”
“You may well say that, sir! Expensive!--It is frightful, horrible,
ruinous!--Expensive! Twenty pounds a year board and Latin; five guineas
washing; five more for writing and arithmetic. Sir, if I were not
resolved that you should not want education, though you may want
fortune, I should--yes, I should--what do you mean, sir?--you are
laughing! Is this your respect, your gratitude to your father?”
A slight shade fell over the bright and intelligent countenance of the
boy.
“Don’t let us talk of gratitude,” said he sadly; “Heaven knows what
either you or I have to be grateful for! Fortune has left to your proud
name but these bare walls and a handful of barren acres; to me she gave
a father’s affection--not such as Nature had made it, but cramped and
soured by misfortunes.”
Here Percy paused, and his father seemed also struck and affected.
“Let us,” renewed in a lighter strain this singular boy, who might have
passed, by some months, his sixteenth year,--“let us see if we cannot
accommodate matters to our mutual satisfaction. You can ill afford my
schooling, and I am resolved that at school I will not stay. Saville is
a relation of ours; he has taken a fancy to me; he has even hinted that
he may leave me his fortune; and he has promised, at least, to afford
me a home and his tuition as long as I like. Give me free passport
hereafter to come and go as I list, and I in turn, will engage never to
cost you another shilling. Come, sir, shall it be a compact?”
“You wound me, Percy,” said the father, with a mournful pride in his
tone; “I have not deserved this, at least from you. You know not,
boy--you know not all that has hardened this heart; but to you it has
not been hard, and a taunt from you--yes, that is the serpent’s tooth!”
Percy in an instant was at his father’s feet; he seized both his hands,
and burst into a passionate fit of tears. “Forgive me,” he said, in
broken words; “I--I meant not to taunt you. I am but a giddy boy!--send
me to school!--do with me as you will!”
“Ay,” said the old man, shaking his head gently, “you know not what pain
a son’s bitter word can send to a parent’s heart. But it is all natural,
perfectly natural! You would reproach me with a love of money, it is the
sin to which youth is the least lenient. But what! can I look round the
world and not see its value, its necessity? Year after year, from my
first manhood, I have toiled and toiled to preserve from the hammer
these last remnants of my ancestor’s remains. Year after year fortune
has slipped from my grasp; and, after all my efforts, and towards the
close of a long life, I stand on the very verge of penury. But you
cannot tell--no man whose heart is not seared with many years can tell
or can appreciate, the motives that have formed my character. You,
however,”--and his voice softened as he laid his hand on his son’s head,
“you, however,--the gay, the bold, the young,--should not have your brow
crossed and your eye dimmed by the cares that surround me. Go! I will
accompany you to town; I will see Saville myself. If he be one with whom
my son can, at so tender an age, be safely trusted, you shall pay him
the visit you wish.”
Percy would have replied but his father checked him; and before the end
of the evening, the father had resolved to forget as much as he pleased
of the conversation.
The elder Godolphin was one of those characters on whom it is vain
to attempt making a permanent impression. The habits of his mind were
durably formed: like waters, they yielded to any sudden intrusion, but
closed instantly again. Early in life he had been taught that he ought
to marry an heiress for the benefit of his estate--his ancestral estate;
the restoration of which he had been bred to consider the grand object
and ambition of life. His views had been strangely baffled; but the more
they were thwarted the more pertinaciously he clung to them. Naturally
kind, generous, and social, he had sunk, at length, into the anchorite
and the miser. All other speculations that should retrieve his ancestral
honours had failed: but there is one speculation that never fails--the
speculation of _saving!_ It was to this that he now indissolubly
attached himself. At moments he was open to all his old habits; but such
moments were rare and few. A cold, hard, frosty penuriousness was his
prevalent characteristic. He had sent this son, with eighteen pence
in his pocket, to a school of twenty pounds a-year; where, naturally
enough, he learned nothing but mischief and cricket: yet he conceived
that his son owed him eternal obligations.
Luckily for Percy, he was an especial favourite with a certain not
uncelebrated character of the name of Saville; and Saville claimed the
privilege of a relation to supply him with money and receive him at his
home. Wild, passionate, fond to excess of pleasure, the young Godolphin
caught eagerly at these occasional visits; and at each his mind, keen
and penetrating as it naturally was, took new flights, and revelled in
new views. He was already the leader of his school, the torment of the
master, and the lover of the master’s daughter. He was sixteen years
old, but a character. A secret pride, a secret bitterness, and an open
wit and recklessness of bearing, rendered him to all seeming a boy more
endowed with energies than affections. Yet a kind word from a friend’s
lips was never without its effect on him, and he might have been led
by the silk while he would have snapped the chain. But these were his
boyish traits of mind: the world soon altered them.
The subject of the visit to Saville was not again touched upon. A little
reflection showed Mr. Godolphin how nugatory were the promises of a
schoolboy that he should not cost his father another shilling; and he
knew that Saville’s house was not exactly the spot in which economy was
best learned. He thought it, therefore, more prudent that his son should
return to school.
To school went Percy Godolphin; and about three weeks afterwards, Percy
Godolphin was condemned to expulsion for returning, with considerable
unction, a slap in the face that he had received from Dr. Shallowell.
Instead of waiting for his father’s arrival, Percy made up a small
bundle of clothes, let himself drop, by the help of the bed-curtains,
from the window of the room in which he was confined, and towards the
close of a fine summer’s evening, found himself on the highroad between
and London, with independence at his heart and (Saville’s last gift) ten
guineas in his pocket.