Rhoda Fleming. Complete
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But he had one thing to discover, and that was, why Sir William had made it a peculiar request that he should come to meet him here. Could the desire possibly be to reconcile him with Mrs. Lovell? His common sense rejected the idea at once: Sir William boasted of her wit and tact, and admired her beauty, but Edward remembered his having responded tacitly to his estimate of her character, and Sir William was not the man to court the alliance of his son with a woman like Mrs. Lovell. He perceived that his father and the fair widow frequently took counsel together. Edward laughed at the notion that the grave senior had himself become fascinated, but without utterly scouting it, until he found that the little lady whom he had led to dinner the first day, was an heiress; and from that, and other indications, he exactly divined the nature of his father’s provident wishes. But this revelation rendered Mrs. Lovell’s behaviour yet more extraordinary. Could it be credited that she was abetting Sir William’s schemes with all her woman’s craft? “Has she,” thought Edward, “become so indifferent to me as to care for my welfare?” He determined to put her to the test. He made love to Adeline Gosling. Nothing that he did disturbed the impenetrable complacency of Mrs. Lovell. She threw them together as she shuffled the guests. She really seemed to him quite indifferent enough to care for his welfare. It was a point in the mysterious ways of women, or of widows, that Edward’s experience had not yet come across. All the parties immediately concerned were apparently so desperately acquiescing in his suit, that he soon grew uneasy. Mrs. Lovell not only shuffled him into places with the raw heiress, but with the child’s mother; of whom he spoke to Algernon as of one too strongly breathing of matrimony to appease the cravings of an eclectic mind.
“Make the path clear for me, then,” said Algernon, “if you don’t like the girl. Pitch her tales about me. Say, I’ve got a lot in me, though I don’t let it out. The game’s up between you and Peggy Lovell, that’s clear. She don’t forgive you, my boy.”
“Ass!” muttered Edward, seeing by the light of his perception, that he was too thoroughly forgiven.
A principal charm of the life at Fairly to him was that there was no one complaining. No one looked reproach at him. If a lady was pale and reserved, she did not seem to accuse him, and to require coaxing. All faces here were as light as the flying moment, and did not carry the shadowy weariness of years, like that burdensome fair face in the London lodging-house, to which the Fates had terribly attached themselves. So, he was gay. He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and a bright one. Young men easily fancy that they may do this, and that when the black volume is shut the tide is stopped. Saying, “I was a fool,” they believe they have put an end to the foolishness. What father teaches them that a human act once set in motion flows on for ever to the great account? Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are. Comfortable Youth thinks otherwise.
The days at a well-ordered country-house, where a divining lady rules, speed to the measure of a waltz, in harmonious circles, dropping like crystals into the gulfs of Time, and appearing to write nothing in his book. Not a single hinge of existence is heard to creak. There is no after-dinner bill. You are waited on, without being elbowed by the humanity of your attendants. It is a civilized Arcadia. Only, do not desire, that you may not envy. Accept humbly what rights of citizenship are accorded to you upon entering. Discard the passions when you cross the threshold. To breathe and to swallow merely, are the duties which should prescribe your conduct; or, such is the swollen condition of the animal in this enchanted region, that the spirit of man becomes dangerously beset.
Edward breathed and swallowed, and never went beyond the prescription, save by talking. No other junior could enter the library, without encountering the scorn of his elders; so he enjoyed the privilege of hearing all the scandal, and his natural cynicism was plentifully fed. It was more of a school to him than he knew.
These veterans, in their arm-chairs, stripped the bloom from life, and showed it to be bare bones: They took their wisdom for an experience of the past: they were but giving their sensations in the present. Not to perceive this, is Youth’s, error when it hears old gentlemen talking at their ease.
On the third morning of their stay at Fairly, Algernon came into Edward’s room with a letter in his hand.
“There! read that!” he said. “It isn’t ill-luck; it’s infernal persecution! What, on earth!—why, I took a close cab to the station. You saw me get out of it. I’ll swear no creditor of mine knew I was leaving London. My belief is that the fellows who give credit have spies about at every railway terminus in the kingdom. They won’t give me three days’ peace. It’s enough to disgust any man with civilized life; on my soul, it is!”
Edward glanced at the superscription of the letter. “Not posted,” he remarked.
“No; delivered by some confounded bailiff, who’s been hounding me.”
“Bailiffs don’t generally deal in warnings.”
“Will you read it!” Algernon shouted.
The letter ran thus:—
“Mr. Algernon Blancove,—
“The writer of this intends taking the first opportunity of meeting you, and gives you warning, you will have to answer his question with a Yes or a No; and speak from your conscience. The respectfulness of his behaviour to you as a gentleman will depend upon that.”
Algernon followed his cousin’s eye down to the last letter in the page.
“What do you think of it?” he asked eagerly.
Edward’s broad thin-lined brows were drawn down in gloom. Mastering some black meditation in his brain, he answered Algernon’s yells for an opinion,—
“I think—well, I think bailiffs have improved in their manners, and show you they are determined to belong to the social march in an age of universal progress. Nothing can be more comforting.”
“But, suppose this fellow comes across me?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Suppose he insists on knowing me?”
“Don’t know yourself.”
“Yes; but hang it! if he catches hold of me?”
“Shake him off.”
“Suppose he won’t let go?”
“Cut him with your horsewhip.”
“You think it’s about a debt, then?”
“Intimidation, evidently.”
“I shall announce to him that the great Edward Blancove is not to be intimidated. You’ll let me borrow your name, old Ned. I’ve stood by you in my time. As for leaving Fairly, I tell you I can’t. It’s too delightful to be near Peggy Lovell.”
Edward smiled with a peculiar friendliness, and Algernon went off, very well contented with his cousin.
CHAPTER XVII
Within a mile of Fairly Park lay the farm of another yeoman; but he was of another character. The Hampshireman was a farmer of renown in his profession; fifth of a family that had cultivated a small domain of one hundred and seventy acres with sterling profit, and in a style to make Sutton the model of a perfect farm throughout the country. Royal eyes had inspected his pigs approvingly; Royal wits had taken hints from Jonathan Eccles in matters agricultural; and it was his comforting joke that he had taught his Prince good breeding. In return for the service, his Prince had transformed a lusty Radical into a devoted Royalist. Framed on the walls of his parlours were letters from his Prince, thanking him for specimen seeds and worthy counsel: veritable autograph letters of the highest value. The Prince had steamed up the salt river, upon which the Sutton harvests were mirrored, and landed on a spot marked in honour of the event by a broad grey stone; and from that day Jonathan Eccles stood on a pinnacle of pride, enabling him to see horizons of despondency hitherto unknown to him. For he had a son, and the son was a riotous devil, a most wild young fellow, who had no taste for a farmer’s life, and openly declared his determination not to perpetuate the Sutton farm in the hands of the Eccleses, by running off one day and entering the ranks of the British army.
Those framed letters became melancholy objects for contemplation, when Jonathan thought that no posterity of his would point them out gloryingly in emulation. Man’s aim is to culminate; but it is the saddest thing in the world to feel that we have accomplished it. Mr. Eccles shrugged with all the philosophy he could summon, and transferred his private disappointment to his country, whose agricultural day was, he said, doomed. “We shall be beaten by those Yankees.” He gave Old England twenty years of continued pre-eminence (due to the impetus of the present generation of Englishmen), and then, said he, the Yankees will flood the market. No more green pastures in Great Britain; no pretty clean-footed animals; no yellow harvests; but huge chimney pots everywhere; black earth under black vapour, and smoke-begrimed faces. In twenty years’ time, sooty England was to be a gigantic manufactory, until the Yankees beat us out of that field as well; beyond which Jonathan Eccles did not care to spread any distinct border of prophecy; merely thanking the Lord that he should then be under grass. The decay of our glory was to be edged with blood; Jonathan admitted that there would be stuff in the fallen race to deliver a sturdy fight before they went to their doom.
For this prodigious curse, England had to thank young Robert, the erratic son of Jonathan.
It was now two years since Robert had inherited a small legacy of money from an aunt, and spent it in waste, as the farmer bitterly supposed. He was looking at some immense seed-melons in his garden, lying about in morning sunshine—a new feed for sheep, of his own invention,—when the call of the wanderer saluted his ears, and he beheld his son Robert at the gate.
“Here I am, sir,” Robert sang out from the exterior.
“Stay there, then,” was his welcome.
They were alike in their build and in their manner of speech. The accost and the reply sounded like reports from the same pistol. The old man was tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular—a grey edition of the son, upon whose disorderly attire he cast a glance, while speaking, with settled disgust. Robert’s necktie streamed loose; his hair was uncombed; a handkerchief dangled from his pocket. He had the look of the prodigal, returned with impudence for his portion instead of repentance.
“I can’t see how you are, sir, from this distance,” said Robert, boldly assuming his privilege to enter.
“Are you drunk?” Jonathan asked, as Robert marched up to him.
“Give me your hand, sir.”
“Give me an answer first. Are you drunk?”
Robert tried to force the complacent aspect of a mind unabashed, but felt that he made a stupid show before that clear-headed, virtuously-living old, man of iron nerves. The alternative to flying into a passion, was the looking like a fool.
“Come, father,” he said, with a miserable snigger, like a yokel’s smile; “here I am at last. I don’t say, kill the fatted calf, and take a lesson from Scripture, but give me your hand. I’ve done no man harm but myself—damned if I’ve done a mean thing anywhere! and there’s no shame to you in shaking your son’s hand after a long absence.”
Jonathan Eccles kept both hands firmly in his pockets.
“Are you drunk?” he repeated.
Robert controlled himself to answer, “I’m not.”
“Well, then, just tell me when you were drunk last.”
“This is a pleasant fatherly greeting!” Robert interjected.
“You get no good by fighting shy of a simple question, Mr. Bob,” said Jonathan.
Robert cried querulously, “I don’t want to fight shy of a simple question.”
“Well, then; when were you drunk last? answer me that.”
“Last night.”
Jonathan drew his hand from his pocket to thump his leg.
“I’d have sworn it!”
All Robert’s assurance had vanished in a minute, and he stood like a convicted culprit before his father.
“You know, sir, I don’t tell lies. I was drunk last night. I couldn’t help it.”
“No more could the little boy.”
“I was drunk last night. Say, I’m a beast.”
“I shan’t!” exclaimed Jonathan, making his voice sound as a defence to this vile charge against the brutish character.
“Say, I’m worse than a beast, then,” cried Robert, in exasperation. “Take my word that it hasn’t happened to me to be in that state for a year and more. Last night I was mad. I can’t give you any reasons. I thought I was cured but I’ve trouble in my mind, and a tide swims you over the shallows—so I felt. Come, sir—father, don’t make me mad again.”
“Where did you get the liquor?” inquired Jonathan.
“I drank at ‘The Pilot.’”
“Ha! there’s talk there of ‘that damned old Eccles’ for a month to come—‘the unnatural parent.’ How long have you been down here?”
“Eight and twenty hours.”
“Eight and twenty hours. When are you going?”
“I want lodging for a night.”
“What else?”
“The loan of a horse that’ll take a fence.”
“Go on.”
“And twenty pounds.”
“Oh!” said Jonathan. “If farming came as easy to you as face, you’d be a prime agriculturalist. Just what I thought! What’s become of that money your aunt Jane was fool enough to bequeath to you?”
“I’ve spent it.”
“Are you a Deserter?”
For a moment Robert stood as if listening, and then white grew his face, and he swayed and struck his hands together. His recent intoxication had unmanned him.
“Go in—go in,” said his father in some concern, though wrath was predominant.
“Oh, make your mind quiet about me.” Robert dropped his arms. “I’m weakened somehow—damned weak, I am—I feel like a woman when my father asks me if I’ve been guilty of villany. Desert? I wouldn’t desert from the hulks. Hear the worst, and this is the worst: I’ve got no money—I don’t owe a penny, but I haven’t got one.”
“And I won’t give you one,” Jonathan appended; and they stood facing one another in silence.
A squeaky voice was heard from the other side of the garden hedge of clipped yew.
“Hi! farmer, is that the missing young man?” and presently a neighbour, by name John Sedgett, came trotting through the gate, and up the garden path.
“I say,” he remarked, “here’s a rumpus. Here’s a bobbery up at Fairly. Oh! Bob Eccles! Bob Eccles! At it again!”
Mr. Sedgett shook his wallet of gossip with an enjoying chuckle. He was a thin-faced creature, rheumy of eye, and drawing his breath as from a well; the ferret of the village for all underlying scandal and tattle, whose sole humanity was what he called pitifully ‘a peakin’ at his chest, and who had retired from his business of grocer in the village upon the fortune brought to him in the energy and capacity of a third wife to conduct affairs, while he wandered up and down and knitted people together—an estimable office in a land where your house is so grievously your castle.
“What the devil have you got in you now?” Jonathan cried out to him.
Mr. Sedgett was seized by his complaint and demanded commiseration, but, recovering, he chuckled again.
“Oh, Bob Eccles! Don’t you never grow older? And the first day down among us again, too. Why, Bob, as a military man, you ought to acknowledge your superiors. Why, Stephen Bilton, the huntsman, says, Bob, you pulled the young gentleman off his horse—you on foot, and him mounted. I’d ha’ given pounds to be there. And ladies present! Lord help us! I’m glad you’re returned, though. These melons of the farmer’s, they’re a wonderful invention; people are speaking of ‘em right and left, and says, says they, Farmer Eccles, he’s best farmer going—Hampshire ought to be proud of him—he’s worth two of any others: that they are fine ones! And you’re come back to keep ‘em up, eh, Bob? Are ye, though, my man?”
“Well, here I am, Mr. Sedgett,” said Robert, “and talking to my father.”
“Oh! I wouldn’t be here to interrupt ye for the world.” Mr. Sedgett made a show of retiring, but Jonathan insisted upon his disburdening himself of his tale, saying: “Damn your raw beginnings, Sedgett! What’s been up? Nobody can hurt me.”
“That they can’t, neighbour; nor Bob neither, as far as stand up man to man go. I give him three to one—Bob Eccles! He took ‘em when a boy. He may, you know, he may have the law agin him, and by George! if he do—why, a man’s no match for the law. No use bein’ a hero to the law. The law masters every man alive; and there’s law in everything, neighbour Eccles; eh, sir? Your friend, the Prince, owns to it, as much as you or me. But, of course, you know what Bob’s been doing. What I dropped in to ask was, why did ye do it, Bob? Why pull the young gentleman off his horse? I’d ha’ given pounds to be there!”
“Pounds o’ tallow candles don’t amount to much,” quoth Robert.
“That’s awful bad brandy at ‘The Pilot,’” said Mr. Sedgett, venomously.
“Were you drunk when you committed this assault?” Jonathan asked his son.
“I drank afterwards,” Robert replied.
“‘Pilot’ brandy’s poor consolation,” remarked Mr. Sedgett.
Jonathan had half a mind to turn his son out of the gate, but the presence of Sedgett advised him that his doings were naked to the world.
“You kicked up a shindy in the hunting-field—what about? Who mounted ye?”
Robert remarked that he had been on foot.
“On foot—eh? on foot!” Jonathan speculated, unable to realize the image of his son as a foot-man in the hunting-field, or to comprehend the insolence of a pedestrian who should dare to attack a mounted huntsman. “You were on foot? The devil you were on foot! Foot? And caught a man out of his saddle?”
Jonathan gave up the puzzle. He laid out his fore finger decisively,—
“If it’s an assault, mind, you stand damages. My land gives and my land takes my money, and no drunken dog lives on the produce. A row in the hunting-field’s un-English, I call it.”
“So it is, sir,” said Robert.
“So it be, neighbour,” said Mr. Sedgett.
Whereupon Robert took his arm, and holding the scraggy wretch forward, commanded him to out with what he knew.
“Oh, I don’t know no more than what I’ve told you.” Mr. Sedgett twisted a feeble remonstrance of his bones, that were chiefly his being, at the gripe; “except that you got hold the horse by the bridle, and wouldn’t let him go, because the young gentleman wouldn’t speak as a gentleman, and—oh! don’t squeeze so hard—”
“Out with it!” cried Robert.
“And you said, Steeve Bilton said, you said, ‘Where is she?’ you said, and he swore, and you swore, and a lady rode up, and you pulled, and she sang out, and off went the gentleman, and Steeve said she said, ‘For shame.’”
“And it was the truest word spoken that day!” Robert released him. “You don’t know much, Mr. Sedgett; but it’s enough to make me explain the cause to my father, and, with your leave, I’ll do so.”
Mr. Sedgett remarked: “By all means, do;” and rather preferred that his wits should be accused of want of brightness, than that he should miss a chance of hearing the rich history of the scandal and its origin. Something stronger than a hint sent him off at a trot, hugging in his elbows.
“The postman won’t do his business quicker than Sedgett ‘ll tap this tale upon every door in the parish,” said Jonathan.
“I can only say I’m sorry, for your sake;” Robert was expressing his contrition, when his father caught him up,—
“Who can hurt me?—my sake? Have I got the habits of a sot?—what you’d call ‘a beast!’ but I know the ways o’ beasts, and if you did too, you wouldn’t bring them in to bear your beastly sins. Who can hurt me?—You’ve been quarrelling with this young gentleman about a woman—did you damage him?”
“If knuckles could do it, I should have brained him, sir,” said Robert.
“You struck him, and you got the best of it?”
“He got the worst of it any way, and will again.”
“Then the devil take you for a fool! why did you go and drink I could understand it if you got licked. Drown your memory, then, if that filthy soaking’s to your taste; but why, when you get the prize, we’ll say, you go off headlong into a manure pond?—There! except that you’re a damned idiot!” Jonathan struck the air, as to observe that it beat him, but for the foregoing elucidation: thundering afresh, “Why did you go and drink?”
“I went, sir, I went—why did I go?” Robert slapped his hand despairingly to his forehead. “What on earth did I go for?—because I’m at sea, I suppose. Nobody cares for me. I’m at sea, and no rudder to steer me. I suppose that’s it. So, I drank. I thought it best to take spirits on board. No; this was the reason—I remember: that lady, whoever she was, said something that stung me. I held the fellow under her eyes, and shook him, though she was begging me to let him off. Says she—but I’ve drunk it clean out of my mind.”
“There, go in and look at yourself in the glass,” said Jonathan.
“Give me your hand first,”—Robert put his own out humbly.
“I’ll be hanged if I do,” said Jonathan firmly. “Bed and board you shall have while I’m alive, and a glass to look at yourself in; but my hand’s for decent beasts. Move one way or t’ other: take your choice.”
Seeing Robert hesitate, he added, “I shall have a damned deal more respect for you if you toddle.” He waved his hand away from the premises.
“I’m sorry you’ve taken so to swearing of late, sir,” said Robert.
“Two flints strike fire, my lad. When you keep distant, I’m quiet enough in my talk to satisfy your aunt Anne.”
“Look here, sir; I want to make use of you, so I’ll go in.”
“Of course you do,” returned Jonathan, not a whit displeased by his son’s bluntness; “what else is a father good for? I let you know the limit, and that’s a brick wall; jump it, if you can. Don’t fancy it’s your aunt Jane you’re going in to meet.”
Robert had never been a favourite with his aunt Anne, who was Jonathan’s housekeeper.
“No, poor old soul! and may God bless her in heaven!” he cried.
“For leaving you what you turned into a thundering lot of liquor to consume—eh?”
“For doing all in her power to make a man of me; and she was close on it—kind, good old darling, that she was! She got me with that money of hers to the best footing I’ve been on yet—bless her heart, or her memory, or whatever a poor devil on earth may bless an angel for! But here I am.”
The fever in Robert blazed out under a pressure of extinguishing tears.
“There, go along in,” said Jonathan, who considered drunkenness to be the main source of water in a man’s eyes. “It’s my belief you’ve been at it already this morning.”
Robert passed into the house in advance of his father, whom he quite understood and appreciated. There was plenty of paternal love for him, and a hearty smack of the hand, and the inheritance of the farm, when he turned into the right way. Meantime Jonathan was ready to fulfil his parental responsibility, by sheltering, feeding, and not publicly abusing his offspring, of whose spirit he would have had a higher opinion if Robert had preferred, since he must go to the deuce, to go without troubling any of his relatives; as it was, Jonathan submitted to the infliction gravely. Neither in speech nor in tone did he solicit from the severe maiden, known as Aunt Anne, that snub for the wanderer whom he introduced, which, when two are agreed upon the infamous character of a third, through whom they are suffering, it is always agreeable to hear. He said, “Here, Anne; here’s Robert. He hasn’t breakfasted.”
“He likes his cold bath beforehand,” said Robert, presenting his cheek to the fleshless, semi-transparent woman.
Aunt Anne divided her lips to pronounce a crisp, subdued “Ow!” to Jonathan after inspecting Robert; and she shuddered at sight of Robert, and said “Ow!” repeatedly, by way of an interjectory token of comprehension, to all that was uttered; but it was a horrified “No!” when Robert’s cheek pushed nearer.
“Then, see to getting some breakfast for him,” said Jonathan. “You’re not anyway bound to kiss a drunken—”
“Dog’s the word, sir,” Robert helped him. “Dogs can afford it. I never saw one in that state; so they don’t lose character.”
He spoke lightly, but dejection was in his attitude. When his aunt Anne had left the room, he exclaimed,—
“By jingo! women make you feel it, by some way that they have. She’s a religious creature. She smells the devil in me.”
“More like, the brandy,” his father responded.
“Well! I’m on the road, I’m on the road!” Robert fetched a sigh.
“I didn’t make the road,” said his father.