The language used in telling the following story is not (as I hope the reader will soon perceive) the Author’s, but Mr. William Marston’s.
The Author’s intention was, while telling the story, to develop, in the person of an imaginary narrator, the character of a thoroughly good-hearted and tolerably clever man, who has his fingers (as he would say himself) in every one’s pie, and who, for the life of him, cannot keep his own counsel — that is to say, the only person who, by any possibility, could have collected the mass of family gossip which makes up the tale.
Had the Author told it in his own person, it would have been told with less familiarity, and, as he thinks, you would not have laughed quite so often.
I HAD intended to have gone into a family history of the Ravenshoes, from the time of Canute to that of her present Majesty, following it down through every change and revolution, both secular and religious; which would have been deeply interesting, but which would have taken more hard reading than one cares to undertake for nothing. I had meant, I say, to have been quite diffuse on the annals of one of our oldest commoner families; but, on going into the subject, I found I must either chronicle little affairs which ought to have been forgotten long ago, or do my work in a very patchy and inefficient way. When I say that the Ravenshoes have been engaged in every plot, rebellion, and civil war, from about a century or so before the Conquest to 1745, and that the history of the house is marked by cruelty and rapacity in old times, and in those more modern by political tergiversation of the blackest dye, the reader will understand why I hesitate to say too much in reference to a name which I especially honour. In order, however, that I may give some idea of what the hereditary character of the family is, I must just lead the reader’s eye lightly over some of the principal events of their history.
The great Irish families have, as is well known, a banshee, or familiar spirit, who, previous to misfortune or death, flits moaning round the ancestral castle. Now although the Ravenshoes, like all respectable houses, have an hereditary lawsuit; a feud, (with the Humbys, of Hele); a ghost (which the present Ravenshoe claims to have repeatedly seen in early youth); and a buried treasure: yet I have never heard that they had a banshee. Had such been the case, that unfortunate spirit would have had no sinecure of it, but rather must have kept howling night and day for nine hundred years or so, in order to have got through her work at all. For the Ravenshoes were almost always in trouble, and yet had a facility of getting out again, which, to one not aware of the cause, was sufficiently inexplicable. Like the Stuarts, they had always taken the losing side, and yet, unlike the Stuarts, have always kept their heads on their shoulders, and their house over their heads. Lady Ascot says that, if Ambrose Ravenshoe had been attainted in 1745, he’d have been hung as sure as fate: there was evidence enough against him to hang a dozen men. I myself, too, have heard Squire Densil declare, with great pride, that the Ravenshoe of King John’s time was the only Baron who did not sign Magna Charta; and, if there were a Ravenshoe at Runnymede, I have not the slightest doubt that such was the case. Through the Rose wars, again, they were always on the wrong side, whichever that might have been, because your Ravenshoe, mind you, was not bound to either side in those times, but changed as he fancied fortune was going. As your Ravenshoe was the sort of man who generally joined a party just when their success was indubitable — that is to say, just when the reaction against them was about to set in — he generally found himself among the party which was going down hill, who despised him for not joining them before, and opposed to the rising party, who hated him because he had declared against them. Which little game is common enough in this present century among some men of the world, who seem, as a general rule, to make as little by it as ever did the Ravenshoes.
Well, whatever your trimmers make by their motion now-a-days, the Ravenshoes were not successful either at liberal conservatism, or conservative liberalism. At the end of the reign of Henry VII. they were as poor as Job, or poorer. But, before you have time to think of it, behold, in 1530, there comes you to court a Sir Alured Ravenshoe, who incontinently begins cutting in at the top of the tune, swaggering, swearing, dressing, fighting, dicing, and all that sort of thing, and, what is more, paying his way in a manner which suggests successful burglary as the only solution. Sir Alured, however, as I find, had done no worse than marry an old maid (Miss Hincksey, one of the Staffordshire Hinckseys) with a splendid fortune; which fortune set the family on its legs again for some generations. This Sir Alured seems to have been an audacious rogue. He made great interest with the king, who was so far pleased with his activity in athletic sports that he gave him a post in Ireland. There our Ravenshoe was so fascinated by the charming manners of the Earl of Kildare that he even accompanied that nobleman on a visit to Desmond; and, after a twelvemonth’s unauthorized residence in the interior of Ireland, on his return to England he was put into the Tower for six months to “consider himself.”
This Alured seems to have been a deuce of a fellow, a very good type of the family. When British Harry had that difference we wot of with the Bishop of Rome, I find Alured to have been engaged in some five or six Romish plots, such as, had the king been in possession of facts, would have consigned him to a rather speedy execution. However, the king seems to have looked on this gentleman with a suspicious eye, and to have been pretty well aware what sort of man he was, for I find him writing to his wife, on the occasion of his going to Court — “The King’s Grace looked but sourly upon me, and said it should go hard, but that the pitcher which went so oft to the well should be broke at last. Thereto I making answer, ‘that that should depend on the pitcher, whether it were iron or clomb,’ he turned on his heel, and presently departed from me.”
He must have been possessed of his full share of family audacity to sharpen his wits on the terrible Harry, with such an unpardonable amount of treason hanging over him. I have dwelt thus long on him, as he seems to have possessed a fair share of the virtues and vices of his family — a family always generous and brave, yet always led astray by bad advisers. This Alured built Ravenshoe House, as it stands to this day, and in which much of the scene of this story is laid.
They seem to have got through the Gunpowder Plot pretty well, though I can show you the closet where one of the minor conspirators, one Watson, lay perdu for a week or so after that gallant attempt, more I suspect from the effect of a guilty conscience than any thing else, for I never heard of any distinct charge being brought against him. The Forty-five, however, did not pass quite so easily, and Ambrose Ravenshoe went as near to lose his head as any one of the family since the Conquest. When the news came from the north about the alarming advance of the Highlanders, it immediately struck Ambrose that this was the best opportunity for making a fool of himself that could possibly occur. He accordingly, without hesitation or consultation with any mortal soul, rang the bell for his butler, sent for his stud-groom, mounted every man about the place (twenty or so), armed them, grooms, gardeners, and all, with crossbows and partizans from he armoury, and rode into the cross, at Stonnington, on a market day, and boldly proclaimed the Pretender king. It soon got about that “the Squire ” was making a fool of himself, and that there was some fun going; so he shortly found himself surrounded by a large and somewhat dirty rabble, who, with cries of “Well done, old rebel!” and “Hurrah for the Pope!” escorted him, his terror-stricken butler and his shame-stricken grooms, to the Crown and Sceptre. As good luck would have it, there happened to be in the town that day no less a person than Lord Segur, the leading Roman Catholic nobleman of the county. He, accompanied by several of the leading gentlemen of the same persuasion, burst into the room where the Squire sat, overpowered him, and, putting him bound into a coach, carried him off to Segur Castle, and locked him up. It took all the strength of the Popish party to save him from attainder. The Church rallied right bravely round the old house, which had always assisted her with sword and purse, and never once had wavered in its allegiance. So, while nobler heads went down, Ambrose Ravenshoe’s remained on his shoulders.
Ambrose died in 1759.
John (Monseigneur) in 1771.
Howard in 1800. He first took the Claycomb hounds.
Petre in 1820. He married Alicia, only daughter of Charles, third Earl of Ascot, and was succeeded by Densil, the first of our dramatis personae — the first of all this shadowy line that we shall see in the flesh. He was born in the year 1783, and married, first in 1812, at his father’s desire, a Miss Winkleigh, of whom I know nothing; and second, at his own desire, in 1823, Susan, fourth daughter of Lawrence Petersham, Esq., of Fairford Grange, county Worcester, by whom he had issue —
Cuthbert, born 1826.
Charles, born 1831.
Densil was an only son. His father, a handsome, careless, good-humoured, but weak and superstitious man, was entirely in the hands of the priests, who during his life were undisputed masters of Ravenshoe. Lady Alicia was, as I have said, a daughter of Lord Ascot, a Staunton, as staunchly Protestant a house as any in England. She, however, managed to fall in love with the handsome young Popish Squire, and to elope with him, changing not only her name, but, to the dismay of her family, her faith also, and becoming, pervert-like, more actively bigoted than her easy-going husband. She brought little or no money into the family; and, from her portrait, appears to have been exceedingly pretty, and monstrously silly.
To this strong-minded couple was born, two years after their marriage, a son, who was called Densil.
This young gentleman seems to have got on much like other young gentlemen till the age of twenty-one, when it was determined by the higher powers in conclave assembled that he should go to London and see the world; and so, having been cautioned duly how to avoid the flesh and the devil, to see the world he went. In a short time intelligence came to the confessor of the family, and through him to the father and mother, that Densil was seeing the world with a vengeance; that he was the constant companion of the Right Honourable Viscount Saltire, the great dandy of the Radical Atheist set, with whom no man might play picquet and live; that he had been upset in a tilbury with Mademoiselle Vaurien of Drury-lane at Kensington turnpike; that he had fought the French emigre, a Comte De Hautenbas, apropos of the Vaurien aforementioned — in short, that he was going on at a deuce of a rate: and so a hurried council was called to deliberate what was to be done.
“He will lose his immortal soul,” said the priest.
“He will dissipate his property,” said his mother.
“He will go to the devil,” said his father.
So Father Clifford, good man, was despatched to London, with post horses, and ordered to bring back the lost sheep vi et armis. Accordingly, at ten o’clock one night, Densil’s lad was astounded by having to admit Father Clifford, who demanded immediately to be led to his master.
Now this was awkward, for James well knew what was going on upstairs; but he knew also what would happen sooner or later to a Ravenshoe servant who trifled with the priest, and so he led the way.
The lost sheep which the good father had come to ind was not exactly sober this evening, and certainly not in a very good temper. He was playing ecarte with a singularly handsome, though supercilious-looking man, dressed in the height of fashion, who, judging from the heap of gold beside him, had been winning heavily. The priest trembled and crossed himself — this man was the terrible, handsome, wicked, witty, Atheistical, radical Lord Saltire, whose tongue no woman could withstand, and whose pistol no man dared face; who was currently believed to have sold himself to the deuce, or, indeed, as some said, to be the deuce himself.
A more cunning man than poor simple Father Clifford would have made some commonplace remark and withdrawn, after a short greeting, taking warning by the impatient scowl that settled on Densil’s handsome face, Not so he. To be defied by the boy whose law had been his word for ten years past never entered into his head, and he sternly advanced towards the pair.
Densil inquired if anything were the matter at home. And Lord Saltire, anticipating a scene, threw himself back in his chair, stretched out his elegant legs, and looked on with the air of a man who knows he is going to be amused, and composes himself thoroughly to appreciate the entertainment.
“Thus much, my son,” said the priest; “your mother is wearing out the stones of the oratory with her knees, praying for her first-born, while he is wasting his substance, and perilling his soul, with debauched atheistic companions, the enemies of God and man.”
Lord Saltire smiled sweetly, bowed elegantly, and took snuff.
“Why do you intrude into my room and insult my guests?” said Densil, casting an angry glance at the priest, who stood calmly like a black pillar, with his hands folded before him. “It is unendurable.”
“Quern Deus vult” &c. Father Clifford had seen that scowl once or twice before, but he would not take warning. He said —
“I am ordered not to go westward without you. I command you to come.”
“Command me! command a Ravenshoe!” said Densil, furiously.
Father Clifford, by way of mending matters, now began to lose his temper.
“You would not be the first Ravenshoe who has been commanded by a priest; ay, and has had to obey too,” said he.
“And you will not be the first jack-priest who has felt the weight of a Ravenshoe’s wrath,” replied Densil, brutally.
Lord Saltire leant back, and said to the ambient air, “I’ll back the priest, five twenties to one.”
This was too much. Densil would have liked to quarrel with Saltire, but that was death — he was the deadest shot in Europe. He grew furious, and beyond all control. He told the priest to go to (further than purgatory); grew blasphemous, emphatically renouncing the creed of his forefathers, and, in fact, all other reeds. The priest grew hot and furious too, retaliated in no measured terms, and finally left the room with his ears stopped, shaking the dust off his feet as he went. Then Lord Saltire drew up to the table again, laughing.
“Your estates are entailed, Ravenshoe, I suppose?” said he.
“No.”
“Oh! It’s your deal, my dear fellow.”
Densil got an angry letter from his father in a few days, demanding full apologies and recantations, and an immediate return home. Densil had no apologies to make, and did not intend to return till the end of the season. His father wrote, declining the honour of his further acquaintance, and sending him a draft for fifty pounds to pay his outstanding bills, which he very well knew amounted to several thousands. In a short time the great Catholic tradesmen, with whom he had been dealing, began to press for money in a somewhat insolent way; and now Densil began to see that, by defying and insulting the faith and the party to which he belonged, he had merely cut himself off from rank, wealth, and position. He had defied the partie pretre, and had yet to feel their power. In two months he wain the Fleet prison.
His servant (the title “tiger” came in long after this), a half groom, half valet, such as men kept in those days — a simple lad from Ravenshoe, James Horton by name — for the first time in his life disobeyed orders; or, on being told to return home by Densil, he firmly declined doing so, and carried his top boots and white neckcloth triumphantly into the Fleet, there pursuing his usual avocations with the utmost nonchalance.
“A very distinguished fellow that of yours, Curly ” (they all had nicknames for one another in those days), said Lord Saltire. “If I were not Saltire, I think I would be Jim. To own the only clean face among six hundred fellow-creatures is a preeminence, a decided preeminence. I’ll buy him of you.”
For Lord Saltire came to see him, snuff-box and all. That morning Densil was sitting brooding in the dirty room with the barred windows, and thinking what a wild free wind would be sweeping across the Downs this fine November day, when the door was opened, and in walks me my lord, with a sweet smile on his face.
He was dressed in the extreme of fashion — a long-tailed blue coat with gold buttons, a frill to his shirt, a white cravat, a wonderful short waistcoat, loose short nankeen trousers, low shoes, no gaiters, and a low-crowned hat. I am pretty correct, for I have seen his picture, dated 1804?. But you must please to remember that his lordship was in the very van of the fashion, and that probably such a dress was not universal for two or three years afterwards. I wonder if his well-known audacity would be sufficient to make him walk along one of the public thoroughfares in such a dress, tomorrow, for a heavy bet — I fancy not.
He smiled sardonically — “My dear fellow,” he said, “when a man comes on a visit of condolence, I know it is the most wretched taste to say, ‘I told you so;' but do me the justice to allow that I offered to back the priest five to one. I had been coming to you all the week, but Tuesday and Wednesday I was at Newmarket; Thursday I was shooting at your cousin Ascot’s; yesterday I did not care about boring myself with you; so I have come today because I was at leisure and had nothing better to do.”
Densil looked up savagely, thinking he had come to insult him; but the kindly compassionate look in the piercing grey eye belied the cynical curl of the mouth, and disarmed him. He leant his head upon the table, and sobbed.
Lord Saltire laid his hand kindly on his shoulder, and said —
“You have been a fool, Ravenshoe; you have denied the faith of your forefathers. Pardieu, if I had such an article, I would not have thrown it so lightly away.”
“You talk like this? Who next? It was your conversation led me to it. Am I worse than you? What faith have you, in God’s name?”
“The faith of a French Lycee, my friend; the only one I ever had. I have been sufficiently consistent to that, I think.”
“Consistent, indeed,” groaned poor Densil.
“Now, look here,” said Saltire; “I may have been to blame in this. But I give you my honour,
I had no more idea that you would be obstinate enough to bring matters to this pass, than I had that you would burn down Ravenshoe House because I laughed at it for being old-fashioned. Go home, my poor little Catholic pipkin, and don’t try to swim with iron pots like Wrekin and me. Make submission to that singularly distingue-looking old turkey-cock of a priest, kiss your mother, and get your usual autumn’s hunting and shooting.”
“Too late! too late, now!” sobbed Densil.
“Not at all, my dear fellow,” said Saltire, taking a pinch of snuff; “the partridges will be a little wild of course — that you must expect; but you ought to get some very pretty pheasant and cock-shooting. Come, say yes. Have your debts paid, and get out of this infernal hole. A week of this would tame the devil, I should think.”
“If you think you could do anything for me, Saltire.”
Lord Saltire immediately retired, and reappeared, leading in a lady by her hand. She raised the veil from her head, and he saw his mother. In a moment she was crying on his neck; and, as he looked over her shoulder, he saw a blue coat passing out of the door, and that was the last of Lord Saltire for the present.
It was no part of the game of the priests to give Densil a cold welcome home. Twenty smiling faces were grouped in the porch to welcome him back; and among them all none smiled more brightly than the old priest and his father. The dogs went wild with joy, and is favourite peregrine scolded on the falconer’s wrist, and struggled with her jesses, shrilly reminding him of the merry old days by the dreary salt marsh, or the lonely lake.
The past was never once alluded to in any way by any one in the house. Only Squire Petre shook hands with faithful James, and gave him a watch, ordering him to ride a certain colt next day, and see how well forward he could get him. So next day they drew the home covers, and the fox, brave fellow, ran out to Parkside, making for the granite walls of Hessitor. And, when Densil felt his nostrils filled once more by the free rushing mountain air, he shouted aloud for joy, and James’s voice along side of him said —
“This is better than the Fleet, sir.”
And so Densil played a single-wicket match with the Holy Church, and, like a great many other people, got bowled out in the first innings. He returned to his allegiance in the most exemplary manner, and settled down into the most humdrum of young country gentlemen. He did exactly what every one else about him did. He was not naturally a profligate or vicious man; but there was a wild devil of animal passion in him, which had broken out in London, and which was now quieted by dread of consequences, but which he felt and knew was there, and might break out again. He was a changed man. There was a gulf between him and the life he had led before he went to London. He had tasted of liberty (or rather, not to profane that Divine ord, of licentiousness), and yet not drunk long enough to make him weary of the draught. He had heard the dogmas he was brought up to believe infallible turned to unutterable ridicule by men like Saltire and Wrekin; men who, as he had the wit to see, were a thousand times cleverer and better informed than Father Clifford or Father Dennis. In short, he had found out, as a great many others have, that Popery won’t hold water, and so, as a pis alter, he adopted Saltire’s creed — that religion was necessary for the government of States, that one religion was as good as another, and that, ceteris paribus, the best religion was the one which secured the possessor ￡10,000 a year; and therefore Densil was a devout Catholic.
It was thought by the allied powers that he ought to marry. He had no objection, and so he married a young lady, a Miss Winkleigh — Catholic, of course — about whom I can get no information whatever. Lady Ascot says that she was a pale girl, with about as much air as a milkmaid; on which two facts I can build no theory as to her personal character. She died in 1816, childless; and in 1820 Densil lost both his father and mother, and found himself, at the age of thirty-seven, master of Ravenshoe, and master of himself.
He felt the loss of the old folks most keenly, more keenly than that of his wife. He seemed without a stay or holdfast in the world, for he was a poorly-educated man, without resources; and so he went on moping and brooding until good old Father Clifford, who loved him early, got alarmed, and recommended travels. He recommended Rome, the cradle of the faith, and to Rome he went.
He stayed in Rome a year; at the end of which time he appeared suddenly at home with a beautiful young wife on his arm. As Father Clifford, trembling and astonished, advanced to lay his hand upon her head, she drew up, laughed, and said, “Spare yourself the trouble, my dear sir; I am a Protestant.”
I have had to tell you all this, in order to show you how it came about that Densil, though a Papist, bethought of marrying a Protestant wife to keep up a balance of power in his house. For, if he had not married this lady, the hero of this book would never have been born; and this greater proposition contains the less, “that, if he had never been born, his history would never have been written, and so this book would have had no existence.”
The second Mrs. Ravenshoe was the handsome dower-less daughter of a Worcester squire, of good standing, who, being blessed with an extravagant” son, and six handsome daughters, had lived for several years abroad, finding society more accessible, and, consequently, the matrimonial chances of the “Petersham girls ” proportionately greater than in England. She was a handsome, proud woman, not particularly clever, or particularly agreeable, or particularly anything, except particularly self-possessed. She had been long enough looking after an establishment to know thoroughly the value of one, and had seen quite enough of good houses to know that a house without a mistress was no house at all. Accordingly, in a very few days the house felt her presence, submitted with the best grace to her not unkindly rule, and in a week they all felt as if she had been there for years.
Father Clifford, who longed only for peace, and was getting very old, got very fond of her, heretic as she was. She, too, liked the handsome, gentlemanly old man, and made herself agreeable to him, as a woman of he world knows so well how to do. Father Mackworth, on the other hand, his young coadjutor since Father Dennis’s death, an importation of Lady Alicia’s from Rome, very soon fell under her displeasure. The first Sunday after her arrival, she drove to church, and occupied the great old family pew, to the immense astonishment of the rustics, and, after afternoon service, caught up the old vicar in her imperious offhand way, and, will he nil he, carried him off to dinner — at which meal he was horrified to find himself sitting with two shaven priests, who talked Latin and crossed themselves. His embarrassment was greatly increased by the behaviour of Mrs. Ravenshoe, who admired his sermon, and spoke on doctrinal points with him as though there were not a priest within a mile. Father Mackworth was imprudent enough to begin talking at him, and at last said something unmistakably impertinent; upon which Mrs. Ravenshoe put her glass in her eye, and favoured him with such a glance of haughty astonishment as silenced him at once.
This was the beginning of hostilities between them, if one can give the name of hostilities to a series of infinitesimal annoyances on the one side, and to immeasurable and barely concealed contempt on the other. Mackworth, on the one hand, knew that she understood and despised him, and he hated her. She, on the other hand, knew that he knew it, but thought him too much below her to notice, save now and then that she might put down with a high hand any, even the most distant, pproach to a tangible impertinence. But she was no match for him in the arts of petty, delicate, galling annoyances. There he was her master; he had been brought up in a good school for that, and had learnt his lesson kindly. He found out that she disliked his presence, and shrunk from his smooth, lean face with unutterable dislike. From that moment he was always in her way, overwhelming her with oily politeness, rushing across the room to pick up anything she had dropped, or to open the door, till it required the greatest restraint to avoid breaking through all forms of politeness, and bidding him begone. But why should we go on detailing trifles like these, which in themselves are nothing, but accumulated, are unbearable?
So it went on, till one morning, about two years after the marriage, Mackworth appeared in Clifford’s room, and, yawning, threw himself into a chair.
“Benedicite,” said Father Clifford, who never neglected religious etiquette on any occasion.
Mackworth stretched out his legs and yawned, rather rudely, and then relapsed into silence. Father Clifford went on reading. At last Mackworth spoke.
“I’ll tell you what, my good friend, I am getting sick of this; I shall go back to Borne.”
“To Borne r
“Yes, back to Borne,” repeated the other impertinently, for he always treated the good old priest with contemptuous insolence when they were alone. “What is the use of staying here, fighting that woman? There's no more chance of turning her than a rock, and there is going to be no family.”
“You think so?” said Clifford.
“Good heavens, does it look like it? Two years, and not a sign; besides, should I talk of going, if I thought so? Then there would be a career worthy of me; then I should have a chance of deserving well of the Church, by keeping a wavering family in her bosom. And I could do it, too: every child would be a fresh weapon in my hands against that woman. Clifford, do you think that Ravenshoe is safe?”
He said this so abruptly that Clifford coloured and started. Mackworth at the same time turned suddenly upon him, and scrutinized his face keenly.
“Safe!” said the old man; “what makes you fear otherwise?”
“Nothing special,” said Mackworth; “only I have never been easy since you told me of that London escapade years ago.”
“He has been very devout ever since,” said Clifford. “I fear nothing.”
“Humph! Well, I am glad to hear it,” said Mackworth. “I shall go to Home. I’d sooner be gossiping with Alphonse and Pierre in the cloisters than vegetating here. My talents are thrown away.”
He departed down the winding steps [of the priests’ turret, which led to the flower garden. The day was fine, and a pleasant seat a short distance off invited him to sit. He could get a book he knew from the drawingroom and sit there. So, with habitually noiseless tread, he passed along the dark corridor, and opened the drawingroom door.
Nobody was there. The book he wanted was in the little drawingroom beyond, separated from the room he was in by a partly-drawn curtain. The priest advanced silently over the deep piled carpet and looked in.
The summer sunlight, struggling through a waving bower of climbing plants and the small panes of a deeply mullioned window, fell upon two persons, at the sight of whom he paused, and, holding his’ breath, stood, like a black statue in the gloomy room, wrapped in astonishment.
He had never in his life heard these twain use any words beyond those of common courtesy towards one another; he had thought them the most indifferent, the coldest pair, he had ever seen. But now! now, the haughty beauty was bending from her chair over her husband, who sat on a stool at her feet; her arm was round his neck, and her hand was in his; and, as he looked, she parted the clustering black curls from his forehead and kissed him.
He bent forward and listened more eagerly. He could hear the surf on the shore, the sea-birds on the cliffs, the nightingale in the wood; they fell upon his ear, but he could not distinguish them; he waited only for one of the two figures before him to speak.
At last Mrs. Ravenshoe broke silence, but in so low a voice that even he, whose attention was trained to the uttermost, could barely catch what she
“I yield, my love,” said she; “I give you this one, but mind, the rest are mine. I have your solemn promise for that?”
“My solemn promise,” said Densil, and kissed her again.
M My dear,” she resumed, “I wish you could get rid of that priest, that Mackworth. He is irksome to me.”
“He was recommended to my especial care by my mother,” was Densil’s reply. “If you could let him stay I should much rather.”
“Oh, let him stay!” said she; “he is too contemptible for me to annoy myself about. But I distrust him, Densil. He has a lowering look sometimes.”
“He is talented and agreeable,” said Densil; “but I never liked him.”
The listener turned to go, having heard enough, but was arrested by her continuing —
“By the bye, my love, do you know that that impudent girl Norah has been secretly married this three months?”
The priest listened more intently than ever.
“Who to?” asked Densil.
“To James, your keeper.”
“I am glad of that. That lad James stuck to me in prison, Susan, when they all left me. She is a fine faithful creature, too. Mind you give her a good scolding.”
Mackworth had heard enough apparently, for he stole gently away through the gloomy room, and walked musingly upstairs to Father Clifford.
That excellent old man took up the conversation just where it had left off.
“And when,” said he, “my brother, do you propose returning to Rome?”
“I shall not go to Rome at all,” was the satisfactory reply, followed by a deep silence.
In a few months, much to Father Clifford’s joy and surprise, Mrs. Ravenshoe bore a noble boy, which was named Cuthbert. Cuthbert was brought up in the Romish faith, and at five years old had just begun to learn his prayers of Father Clifford, when an event occurred equally unexpected by all parties. Mrs. Ravenshoe was again found to be in a condition to make an addition to her family.
If you were a lazy yachtsman, sliding on a summer’s day, before a gentle easterly breeze, over the long swell from the Atlantic, past the south-westerly shores of the Bristol Channel, you would find, after sailing all day beneath shoreless headlands of black slate, that the land suddenly fell away and sunk down, leaving, instead of beetling cliffs, a lovely amphitheatre of hanging wood and lawn, fronted by a beach of yellow sand — a pleasing contrast to the white surf and dark crag to which your eye had got accustomed.
This beautiful semicircular basin is about two miles in diameter, surrounded by hills on all sides, save that which is open to the sea. East and west the headlands stretch out a mile or more, forming a fine bay open to the north; while behind, landward, the downs roll up above the woodlands, a bare expanse of grass and grey stone. Half way along the sandy beach, a trout-stream comes foaming out of a dark wood, and finds its way across the shore in fifty sparkling channels; and the eye, caught by the silver thread of water, is snatched away above and beyond it, along a wooded glen, the radle of the stream, which pierces the country landward for a mile or two, till the misty vista is abruptly barred by a steep blue hill, which crosses the valley at right angles. A pretty little village stands at the mouth of the stream, and straggles with charming irregularity along the shore for a considerable distance westward; while behind, some little distance up the glen, a handsome church tower rises from among the trees. There are some fishing boats at anchor, there are some small boats on the beach, there is a coasting schooner beached and discharging coal, there are some fishermen lounging, there are some nets drying, there are some boys bathing, there are two grooms exercising four handsome horses; but it is not upon horses, men, boats, ship, village, church, or stream, that you will find your eye resting, but upon a noble, turreted, deep-porched, grey stone mansion, that stands on the opposite side of the stream, about a hundred feet above the village.
On the east bank of the little river, just where it joins the sea, abrupt lawns of grass and fern, beautifully broken by groups of birch and oak, rise above the dark woodlands, at the culminating point of which, on a buttress which runs down from the higher hills behind, stands the house I speak of, the north front looking on the sea, and the west on the wooded glen before mentioned — the house on a ridge dividing the two. Immediately behind again the dark woodlands begin once more, and above them is the moor.
The house itself is of grey stone, built in the time of Henry VIII. The facade is exceedingly noble, though irregular; the most striking feature in the north or sea front being a large dark porch, open on three sides, forming the basement of a high stone tower, which occupies the centre of the building. At the northwest corner (that towards the village) rises another tower of equal height; and behind, above the irregular groups of chimneys, the more modern cupola of the stables shows itself as the highest point of all, and gives, combined with the other towers, a charming air of irregularity to the whole. The windows are mostly long, low, and heavily mullioned, and the walls are battlemented.
On approaching the house, you find that it is built very much after the fashion of a college, with a quadrangle in the centre. Two sides of this, the north and west, are occupied by the house, the south by the stables, and the east by a long and somewhat handsome chapel, of greater antiquity than the rest of the house. The centre of this quad, in place of the trim grass-plat, is occupied by a tan lunging ring, in the middle of which stands a granite basin filled with crystal water from the hills. In front of the west wing, a terraced flower-garden goes step by step towards the stream, till the smooth-shaven lawns almost mingle with the wild ferny heather turf of the park, where the dappled deer browse, and the rabbit runs to and fro busily. On the north, towards the sea, there are no gardens; but a noble gravel terrace, divided from the park only by a deep rampart, runs along beneath the windows; and to the ast the deer-park stretches away till lawn and glade are swallowed up in the encroaching woodland.
Such is Ravenshoe Hall at the present day, and such it was on the 10th of June, 1831 (I like to be particular), as regards the still life of the place; but, if one had then regarded the living inhabitants, one would have seen signs of an unusual agitation. Bound the kitchen door stood a group of female servants talking eagerly together; and, at the other side of the court, some half-dozen grooms and helpers were evidently busy on the same theme, till the appearance of the stud-groom entering the yard suddenly dispersed them right and left; to do nothing with superabundant energy.
To them also entered a lean, quiet-looking man, aged at this time fifty-two. We have seen him before. He was our old friend Jim, who had attended Densil in the Fleet prison in old times. He had some time before this married a beautiful Irish Catholic waiting-maid of Lady Alicia’s, by whom he had a daughter, now five years old, and a son aged one week. He walked across the yard to where the women were talking, and addressed them.
“How is my lady tonight?” said he.
“Holy Mother of God!” said a weeping Irish house-maid, “she’s worse.”
“How’s the young master?”
“Hearty, a darling; crying his little eyes out, he is, a-bless him.”
“He’ll be bigger than Master Cuthbert, I’ll warrant ye,” said a portly cook.
“When was he born?” asked James.
“Nigh on two hours,” said the other speaker.
At this conjuncture a groom came running through the passage, putting a note in his hat as he went; he came to the stud-groom, and said hurriedly, “A note for Dr. Marcy, at Lanceston, sir. What horse am I to take?”
“Trumpeter. How is my lady?”
“Going, as far as I can gather, sir.”
James waited until he’ heard him dash full speed out of the yard, and then till he saw him disappear like a speck along the mountain road far aloft; then he went into the house, and, getting as near to the sick room as he dared, waited quietly on the stairs.
It was a house of woe, indeed! Two hours before, one feeble, wailing little creature had taken up his burthen, and begun his weary pilgrimage across the unknown desolate land that lay between him and the grave — for a part of which you and I are to accompany him; while his mother even now was preparing for her rest, yet striving for the child’s sake to lengthen the last few weary steps of her journey, that they two might walk, were it never so short a distance, together.
The room was very still. Faintly the pure scents and sounds stole into the chamber of death from the blessed summer air without; gently came the murmur of the surf upon the sands; fainter and still fainter came the breath of the dying mother. The babe lay beside her nd her arm was round its body. The old vicar knelt by the bed, and Densil stood with folded arms and bowed head, watching the face which had grown so dear to him, till the light should die out from it for ever. Only those four in the chamber of death!
The sighing grew louder, and the eye grew once more animated. She reached out her hand, and, taking one of the vicar’s, laid it upon the baby’s head. Then she looked at Densil, who was now leaning over her, and with a great effort spoke.
“Densil, dear, you will remember your promise?”
“I will swear it, my love.”
A few more laboured sighs, and a greater effort: “Swear it to me, love.”
He swore that he would respect the promise he had made, so help him God!
The eyes were fixed now, and all was still. Then there was a long sigh; then there was a long silence; then the vicar rose from his knees and looked at Densil. There were but three in the chamber now.
Densil passed through the weeping women, and went straight to his own study. There he sat down, tearless, musing much about her who was gone.
How he had grown to love that woman, he thought — her that he had married for her beauty and her pride, and had thought so cold and hard! He remembered how the love of her had grown stronger, year by year, since their first child was born. How he had respected her or her firmness and consistency; and how often, he thought, had he sheltered his weakness behind her strength! His right hand was gone, and he was left alone to do battle by himself!
One thing was certain. Happen what would, his promise should be respected, and this last boy, just born, should be brought up a Protestant as his mother had wished. He knew the opposition he would have from Father Mackworth, and determined to brave it. And, as the name of that man came into his mind, some of his old fierce, savage nature broke out again, and he almost cursed him aloud.
“I hate that fellow! I should like to defy him, and let him do his worst, I’d do it, now she’s gone, if it wasn’t for the boys. No, hang it, it wouldn’t do. If I’d told him under seal of confession, instead of letting him grub it out, he couldn’t have hung it over me like this. I wish he was — ”
If Father Mackworth had had the slightest inkling of the state of mind of his worthy patron towards him, it is very certain that he would not have chosen that very moment to rap at the door. The most acute of us make a mistake sometimes; and he, haunted with vague suspicions since the conversation he had overheard in the drawingroom before the birth of Cuthbert, grew impatient, and determined to solve his doubts at once, and, as we have seen, selected the singularly happy moment when poor passionate Densil was cursing him to his heart’s content.
“Brother, I am come to comfort you,” he said, opening the door before Densil had time, either to finish the sentence written above, or to say “Come in.” “This is a heavy affliction, and the heavier because — ”
“Go away,” said Densil, pointing to the door.
“Nay, nay,” said the priest, “hear me — ”
“Go away,” said Densil, in a louder tone. “Do you hear me? I want to be alone, and I mean to be. Go!”
How recklessly defiant weak men get when they are once fairly in a rage! Densil, who was in general civilly afraid of this man, would have defied fifty such as he now.
“There is one thing, Mr. Ravenshoe,” said the priest, in a very different tone, “about which I feel it my duty to speak to you, in spite of the somewhat unreasonable form your grief has assumed. I wish to know what you mean to call your son.”
“Why?”
“Because he is ailing, and I wish to baptise him.”
“You will do nothing of the kind, sir,” said Densil, as red as a turkey-cock. “He will be baptised in proper time in the parish church. He is to be brought up a Protestant.”
The priest looked steadily at Densil, who, now brought fairly to bay, was bent on behaving like a valiant man, and said slowly —
“So my suspicions are confirmed, then, and you have determined to hand over your son to eternal perdition ”
(he didn’t say perdition, he used a stronger word, which we will dispense with, if you have no objection).
“Perdition, sir?” bawled Densil; “how dare you talk of a son of mine in that free-and-easy sort of way? Why, what my family has done for the Church ought to keep a dozen generations of Ravenshoes from a possibility of perdition, sir. Don’t tell me.”
This new and astounding theory of justification by works, which poor Densil had broached in his wrath, was overheard by a round-faced, bright-eyed, curly-headed man about fifty, who entered the room suddenly, followed by James. For one instant you might have seen a smile of intense amusement pass over his merry face; but in an instant it was gone again, and he gravely addressed Densil.
“My dear Mr. Ravenshoe, I must use my authority as doctor, to request that your son’s spiritual welfare should for the present yield to his temporal necessities. You must have a wet-nurse, my good sir.”
Densil’s brow had grown placid in a moment beneath the doctor’s kindly glance. “God bless me,” he said, “I never thought of it. Poor little lad! poor little lad!”
“I hope, sir,” said James, “that you will let Norah have the young master. She has set her heart upon it”
“I have seen Mrs. Horton,” said the doctor, “and I quite approve of the proposal. I think it, indeed, a most special providence that she should be able to undertake it. Had it been otherwise, we might have been undone.”
“Let us go at once,” said the impetuous Densil. ‘ Where is the nurse? where is the hoy 1 “And, so saying, he hurried out of the room, followed by the doctor and James.
Mackworth stood alone, looking out of the window, silent. He stood so long that one who watched him peered from his hiding-place more than once to see if he were gone. At length he raised his arm and struck his clenched hand against the rough granite window-sill so hard that he brought blood. Then he moodily left the room.
As soon as the room was quiet, a child about five years old crept stealthily from a dark corner where he had laid hidden, and with a look of mingled shyness and curiosity on Iris face, departed quietly by another door.
Meanwhile, Densil, James, and the doctor, accompanied by the nurse and baby, were holding their way across the courtyard towards a cottage which lay in the wood beyond the stables. James opened the door, and they passed into the inner room.
A beautiful woman was sitting propped up by pillows, nursing a week-old child. The sunlight, admitted by a half-open shutter, fell upon her, lighting up her delicate features, her pale pure complexion, and bringing a strange sheen on her long loose black hair. Her face was bent down gazing on the child which lay on her breast, and at the entrance of the party she looked up, and displayed a large lustrous dark blue eye, which lighted up with nfinite tenderness as Densil, taking the wailing boy from the nurse, placed it on her arm beside the other.
“Take care of that for me, Norah,” said Densil. “It has no mother but you, now.”
“Acushla ma chree,” she answered, “bless my little bird. Come to your nest, alanna, come to your pretty brother, my darlin’.”
The child’s wailing was stilled now, and the doctor remarked, and remembered long afterwards, that the little waxen fingers, clutching uneasily about, came in contact with the little hand of the other child, and paused there. At this moment, a beautiful little girl, about five years old, got on the bed, and nestled her peachy cheek against her mother’s. As they went out, he turned and looked at the beautiful group once more, and then he followed Densil back to the house of mourning.
Reader, before we have done with those three innocent little faces, we shall see them distorted and changed by many passions, and shall meet them in many strange places. Come, take my hand, and we will follow them on to the end.
I HAVE noticed that the sayings and doings of young gentlemen before they come to the age of, say seven or eight, are hardly interesting to any but their immediate relations and friends. 1 have my eye, at this moment, on a young gentleman of the mature age ot two, the instances of whose sagacity and eloquence are of greater importance, and certainly more pleasant, to me, than the projects of Napoleon, or the orations of Bright. And yet I fear that even his most brilliant joke, if committed to paper, would tall dead upon the public ear; and so, for the present, I shall leave Charles Ravenshoe to the care of Norah, and pass on to some others who demand our attention more.
The first thing which John Mackworth rememhered was his being left in the loge of a French school at Rouen by an English footman. Trying to push back his memory further, he always failed to conjure up any previous recollection to that. He had certainly a very indistinct one of having been happier, and having lived quietly in pleasant country places with a kind woman who talked English; but his first decided impression always remained the same that of being, at six years old, left friendless, alone, among twenty or thirty French boys older than himself.
His was a cruel fate. He would have been happier apprenticed to a collier. If the man who sent him there had wished to inflict the heaviest conceivable punishment on the poor unconscious little innocent, he could have done no more than simply left him at that school. We shall see how he found out at last who his benefactor was.
English boys are sometimes brutal to one another (though not so often as some wish to make out), and are always rough. Yet I must say, as far as my personal experience goes, the French boy is entirely master in the art of tormenting. He never strikes; he does not know how to clench his fist. He is an arrant coward, according to an English schoolboy’s definition of the word: but at pinching, pulling hair, ear pulling, and that class of annoyance, all the natural ingenuity of his nation comes out, and he is superb; add to this a combined insolent studied sarcasm, and you have an idea of what a disagreeable French schoolboy can be.
To say that the boys at poor John Mackworth’s school put all these methods of torture in force against him, and ten times more, is to give one but a faint idea of his sufferings. The English at that time were hated with a hatred which we in these sober times have but little idea of; and, with the cannon of Trafalgar ringing as it were in their ears, these young French gentlemen seized on Mackworth as a lawful prize providentially delivered into their hands. We do not know what he may have been under happier auspices, or what he may be yet with a more favourable start in another life; we have only to do with what he was. Six years of friendless persecution, of life ungraced and uncheered by domestic love, of such bitter misery as childhood alone is capable of feeling or enduring, transformed him from a child into a heartless, vindictive man.
And then, the French schoolmaster having roughly finished the piece of goods, it was sent to Rome to be polished and turned out ready for the market. Here I must leave him; I don’t know the process. I have seen the article when finished, and am familiar with it. I know the trade mark on it as well as I know the Tower mark on my rifle. I may predicate of a glass that it is Bohemian ruby, and yet not know how they gave it the colour. I must leave descriptions of that system to Mr. Steinmetz, and men who have been behind the scenes.
The red-hot ultramontane thorough-going Catholicism of that pretty pervert, Lady Alicia, was but ill satisfied with the sensible, old English, cut and dried notions of the good Father Clifford. A comparison of notes with two or three other great ladies, brought about a consultation, and a letter to Rome, the result of which was that a young Englishman of presentable exterior, polite manners, talking English with a slight foreign accent, made his appearance at Ravenshoe, and was installed as her ladyship’s confessor, about eighteen months before her death.
His talents were by no means ordinary. In very few days he had gauged every intellect in the house, and found that he was by far the superior of all in wit and education; and he determined that as long as he stayed in the house he would be master there.
Densil’s jealous temper sadly interfered with this excellent resolution; he was immensely angry and rebellious at the slightest apparent infringement of his prerogative, and after his parents’ death treated Mackworth in such an exceedingly cavalier manner, that the latter feared he should have to move, till chance threw into his hand a whip wherewith he might drive Densil where he would. He discovered a scandalous liaison of poor Densil’s, and in an indirect manner let him know that he knew all about it. This served to cement his influence until the appearance of Mrs. Ravenshoe the second, who, as we have seen, treated him with such ill-disguised contempt, that he was anything but comfortable, and was even meditating a retreat to Borne, when the conversation he overheard in the drawingroom made him pause, and the birth of the boy Cuthbert confirmed his resolution to stay.
For now, indeed, there was a prospect open to him. Here was this child delivered over to him like clay to a potter, that he might form it as he would. It should go hard but that the revenues and county influence of the Ravenshoes should tend to the glory of the Church as heretofore. Only one person was in his way, and that was Mrs. Ravenshoe; after her death he was master of the situation with regard to the eldest of the boys. He had partly guessed, ever since he overheard the conversation of Densil and his wife, that some sort of bargain existed between them about the second child; but he paid little heed to it. It was, therefore, with the bitterest anger that he saw his fears confirmed, and Densil angrily obstinate on the matter; for supposing Cuthbert were to die, all his trouble and anxiety would avail nothing, and the old house and lands would fall to a Protestant heir, the first time in the history of the island. Father Clifford consoled him.
Meanwhile, his behaviour towards Densil was gradually and insensibly altered. He became the free and easy man of the world, the amusing companion, the wise counsellor. He saw that Densil was of a nature to lean on some one, and he was determined it should be on him; so he made himself necessary. But he did more than this; he determined he would be beloved as well as respected, and with a happy audacity he set to work to win that poor wild foolish heart to himself, using such arts of pleasing as must have been furnished by his own mother wit, and could never have been learned in a hundred years from a Jesuit college. The poor heart was not a hard one to win; and, the day they buried poor Father Clifford in the mausoleum, it was with a mixture of pride at his own talents, and contemptuous pity for his dupe, that Mackworth listened to Densil as he told him that he was now his only friend, and besought him not to leave him which thing Mackworth promised, with the deepest sincerity, he would not do.
MASTER CHARLES, blessed with a placid temper and a splendid appetite, throve amazingly. Before you knew where you were, he was in tops and bottoms; before you had thoroughly realized that, he was learning his letters; then there was hardly time to turn round, before he was a rosy-cheeked boy of ten.
From the very first gleam of reason, he had been put solely and entirely under the care of Mr. Snell, the old vicar, who had been with his mother when she died, and a Protestant nurse, Mrs. Varley. Faithfully had these two discharged their sacred trust; and, if love can repay such services, right well were they repaid.
A pleasant task they had, though, for a more lovable little lad than Charles there never was. His little heart seemed to have an infinite capacity of affection for all who approached him. Everything animate came before him in the light of a friend, to whom he wished to make himself agreeable, from his old kind tutor and nurse down to his pony and terrier. Charles had not arrived at the time of life when it was possible for him to quarrel about women; and so he actually had no enemies as yet, but was welcomed by pleasant and kind faces wherever he went. At one time he would be at his father’s knee, while the good-natured Densil made him up some fishing tackle; next you would find him in the kennel with the whipper-in, feeding the hounds, half-smothered by their boisterous welcome; then the stables would own him for a time, while the lads were cleaning up and feeding; then came a sudden flitting to one of the keeper’s lodges; and anon he would be down on the sands wading with half a dozen fisher-boys as happy as himself but welcome and beloved everywhere.
Sunday was a right pleasant day for him. After seeing his father shave, and examining his gold-topped dressing-case from top to bottom amusements which were not participated in by Cuthbert, who had grown too manly he would haste through his breakfast, and with his clean clothes hurry down the village towards the vicarage, which stood across the stream near the church. Not to go in yet, you will observe, because the sermon, he well knew, was getting its finishing touches, and the vicar must not be disturbed. No, the old stone bridge would bring him up; and there he would stay looking at the brown crystal-clear water rushing and seething among the rocks, lying dark under the oak-roots, and flashing merrily over the weir, just above the bridge; till " flick! " a silver bar would shoot quivering into the air, and a salmon would light on the top of the fall, just where the water broke, and would struggle on into the still pool above, or be beaten back by the force, to resume his attempt when he had gained breath. The trout, too, under the bridge, bless the rogues, they knew it was Sunday well enough how they would lie up there in the swiftest places, where glancing liquid glorified the poor pebbles below into living amber, and would hardly trouble themselves to snap at the great fat, silly stoneflies that came floating down. Oh! it was a terrible place for dawdling was that stone bridge, on a summer sabbath morn.
But now would the country folks come trooping in from far and near, for Ravenshoe was the only church for miles, and however many of them there were, every one had a good hearty West-country greeting for him. And, as the crowd increased near the church door, there was so much to say and hear, that I am afraid the prayers suffered a little sometimes.
The villagers were pleased enough to see the lad in the old carved horsebox (not to be irreverent) of a pew, beneath the screen in the chancel, with the light from the old rose window shining on his curly brown hair. The older ones would think of the haughty beautiful lady who sat there so few years ago, and oftentimes one of the more sagacious would shake his head and mutter to himself, "Ah! if he were heir."
Any boy who reads this story, and I hope many will read it, is hereby advertised that it is exceedingly wrong to be inattentive in church in sermon time. It is very naughty to look up through the windows at the white clouds flying across the blue sky, and think how merrily the shadows are sweeping over the upland lawn, where the pewits’ nests are, and the black cock is crowing on the grey stones among the heather. No boy has any right to notice another boy’s absence, and spend sermon-time in wondering whether he is catching crabs among the green and crimson sea-weed on the rocks, or bathing in the still pool under the cliff. A boy had better not go to church at all if he spends his time in thinking about the big trout that lies up in one of the pools of the woodland stream, and whether he will be able to catch a sight of him again by creeping gently through the hazel and king fern. Birds’ nests, too, even though it be the ringousel’s, who is to lay her last egg this blessed day, and is marked for spoliation tomorrow, should be banished from a boy’s mind entirely during church time. Now, I am sorry to say, that Charley was very much given to wander in church, and, when asked about the sermon by the vicar next day, would look rather foolish. Let us hope that he will be a warning to all sinners in this respect.
Then, after church, there would be dinner, at his father’s lunch time, in the dark old hall, and there would be more to tell his father and brother than could be conveniently got through at that meal; then there was church again, and a long stroll in the golden sunshine along the shore. Ah, happy summer sabbaths!
The only two people who were ever cold to Charley, were his brother and Mackworth. Not that they were openly unkind, but there was between both of them and himself an indefinable gulf, an entire want of sympathy, which grieved him sometimes, though he was as yet too young to be much troubled by it. He only exhausted all his little axis of pleasing towards them to try and win them; he was indefatigable in running messages for Cuthbert and the chaplain; and once, when kind grandaunt Ascot (she was a Miss Headstall, daughter of Sir Cingle Headstall, and married Lord George Ascot, brother of Lady Alicia, Densil’s mother) sent him a pineapple in a box, he took it to the priest and would have had him take it. Mackworth refused it, but looked on him not unkindly for a few minutes, and then turned away with a sigh. Perhaps he was trying to recall the time so long, long ago, when his own face was as open and as innocent as that. God knows I Charles cried a little, because the priest wouldn’t take it, and, having given his brother the best slice, ate the rest in the stable, with the assistance of his foster brother and two of the pad grooms. Thereby proving himself to be a lad of low and dissipated habits.
Cuthbert was at this time a somewhat good-looking young fellow of sixteen. Neither of the brothers was what would be called handsome, though, if Charley’s face was the most pleasing, Cuthbert certainly had the most regular features. His forehead was lofty, although narrow, and flat at the sides; his cheek bones were high, and his nose was aquiline, not ill-formed, though prominent, starting rather suddenly out below his eyes; the lips were thin, the mouth small and firmly closed, and the chin short and prominent. The tout ensemble was hardly pleasing even at this youthful period; the face was too much formed and decided for so young a man.
Cuthbert was a reserved methodical lad, with whom no one could find fault, and yet whom few liked. He was studious and devout to an extent rare in one so young; and, although a capital horseman and a good shot, he but seldom indulged in those amusements, preferring rather a walk with the steward, and soon returning to the dark old library to his books and Father Mackworth. There they two would sit, like two owls, hour after hour, appearing only at meals, and talking French to one another, noticing Charley but little; who, however, was always full of news, and would tell it, too, in spite of the inattention of tins strange couple. Densil began to respect and be slightly afraid of his eldest son, as his superior in learning and in natural abilities; but I think Charles had the biggest share in his heart.
Aunt Ascot had a year before sent for Cuthbert to pay her a visit at Ranford, her son’s, Lord Ascot’s place, where she lived with him, he being a widower, and kept house for him. Ranford, we all know, or ought to know, contains the largest private racing stud in England, and the Ascot family for many generations had given themselves up entirely to sporting — so much so, that their marriages with other houses have been to a certain extent influenced by it; and so poor Cuthbert, as we may suppose, was quite like a fish out of water. He detested and despised the men he met there, and they, on their parts, such of them as chose to notice him, thought him a surly young bookworm; and, as for his grandaunt, he hated the very sound of that excellent lady’s voice. Her abruptness, her homoeopathic medicines, her Protestantism (which she was always airing), and her stable-talk, nearly drove him mad; while she, on the other hand, thought him one of the most disagreeable boys she had ever met in her life. So the visit was rather a failure than otherwise, and not very likely to be repeated. Nevertheless, her ladyship was very fond of young faces, and so, in a twelvemonth, she wrote to Densil as follows:—
“I am one mass of lumbago all round the small of my back, and I find nothing like opodeldoc after all. The pain is very severe, but I suppose you would comfort me, as a heretic, by saying it is nothing to what I shall endure in a few years’ time. Bah! I have no patience with you Papists, packing better people than yourselves off somewhere in that free-and-easy way-By-the-bye, how is that father confessor of yours, Markworth, or some such name — mind me, Ravenshoe, that fellow is a rogue, and you being, like all Ravenshoes, a fool, there is a pair of you. Why, if one of Ascot’s grooms was to smile as that man does, or to whine in his speech as that man does, when he is talking to a woman of rank, I’d have him discharged on the spot, without warning, for dishonesty.
“Don’t put a penny on Ascot’s horse at Chester; he will never stay over the Cup course. Curfew, in my opinion, looks by no means badly for the Derby; he is scratched for the Two Thousand — which was necessary, though I am sorry for it, &c. &c. &c.
“I wish you would send me your boy, will you? Not the eldest: the Protestant one. Perhaps he mayn’t be such ah insufferable coxcomb as his brother.”
At which letter Densil shook his honest sides with uproarious laughter. “Cuthbert, my boy,” he said, “you have won your dear aunt’s heart entirely; though she, being determined to mortify the flesh with its affections, does not propose seeing you again, but asks for Charley. The candour of that dear old lady increases with her age. You seem to have been making your court too, father; she speaks of your smile in the most unqualified terms.”
“Her ladyship must do me the honour to quiz me,” said Mackworth. “If it is possible to judge by her eye, she must like me about as well as a mad dog.”
“For my part, father,” said Cuthbert, curling up the corners of his thin lips sardonically, “I shall be highly content to leave my dear aunt in the peaceable enjoyment of her favourite society of grooms, horse-jockies, blacklegs, dissenting ministers, and suchlike. A month in that house, my dear Charley, will qualify you for a billiard-marker; and, after a course of six weeks, you will be fit to take the situation of croupier in a low hell on a racecourse. How you will enjoy yourself, my dear!”
“Steady, Cuthbert, steady,” said his father; “I can’t allow you to talk like that about your cousin’s house. It is a great house for field sports, but there is not a better conducted house in the kingdom.”
Cuthbert lay over on the sofa to fondle a cat, and then continued speaking very deliberately, in a slightly louder voice, —
“I will allow my aunt to be the most polite, intellectual, delicate-minded old lady in creation, my dearest father, if you wish it; only, not having been born (I beg her pardon, dropped) in a racing stable, as she was herself, I can hardly appreciate her conversation always. As for my cousin, I consider him a splendid sample of an hereditary legislator. Charley, dear, you won’t go to church on Sunday afternoon at Ranford; you will go into the croft with your cousin Ascot to see the chickens fed. Ascot is very curious in his poultry, particularly on Sunday afternoon. Father, why does he cut all the cocks’ tails square?”
“Pooh, pooh,” said Densil, “what matter; many do it, besides him. Don’t you be squeamish, Cuthbert — though, mind you, I don’t defend cock-fighting on Sunday.
Cuthbert laughed and departed, taking his cat with him.
Charles had a long coach journey of one day, and then an awful and wonderful journey on the Great Western Railway as far as Twyford — alighting at which place, he was accosted by a pleasant-looking, fresh-coloured boy, dressed in close-fitting cord trousers, a blue handkerchief, spotted with white, and a Scotch cap; who said —
“Oh! I’m your cousin Welter. I’m the same age as you, and I’m going to Eton next half. I’ve brought you over Tiger, because Punch is lame, and the station-master will look after your things; so we can come at once.”
The boys were friends in two minutes; and, going out, there was a groom holding two ponies — on the prettiest of which Charley soon found himself seated, and jogging on with his companion towards Henley.
I like to see two honest lads, just introduced, opening their hearts to one another, and I know nothing more pleasant than to see how they rejoice as each similarity of taste comes out. By the time these two had got to Henley Bridge, Lord Welter had heard the name of every horse in the Ravenshoe stables, and Charley was rapidly getting learned in Lord Ascot’s racing stud. The river at Henley distracted his attention for a time, as the biggest he had seen, and he asked his cousin, “Did he think the Mississippi was much bigger than that now?” and Lord Welter supposed, “Oh dear yes, a great deal bigger,” he should say. Then there was more conversation about dogs and guns, and pleasant country places to ride through; then a canter over a lofty breezy clown, and then the river again, far below, and at their feet the chimneys of Ranford.
The house was very full; and, as the boys came up there was a crowd of phaetons, dog-carts, and saddle-horses, for the people were just arriving home for dinner after the afternoon drive, and, as they had all been to the same object of attraction that afternoon, they had all come in together and were loitering about talking, some not yet dismounted, and some on the steps. Welter was at home at once, and had a word with every one; but Charles was left alone, sitting on his pony, feeling very shy; till, at last, a great brown man with a great brown moustache, and a gruff voice, came up to him and lifted him off the horse, holding him out at arm’s length for inspection.
“So you are Curly Ravenshoe’s boy, hey?” said he.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ha!” said the stranger, putting him down, and leading him towards the door; “just tell your father you saw General Mainwaring, will you, and that he wanted to know how his old friend was.”
Charles looked at the great brown hand which was in his own, and thought of the Affghan war, and of all the deeds of renown that that hand had done, and was raising his eyes to the general’s face, when they were arrested half-way by another face, not the general’s.
It was that of a handsome, grey-headed man, who might have been sixty, he was so well conserve, but who was actually far more. He wore his own white hair, which contrasted strongly with a pair of delicate thin black eyebrows. His complexion was florid, with scarcely a wrinkle, his features were fine and regular, and a pair of sparkling dark grey eyes gave a pleasant light to his face. His dress was wondrously neat, and Charles, looking on him, guessed, with a boy’s tact, that he was a man of mark.
“Whose son did you say he was, general?” said the stranger.
“Curly’s!” said Main waring, stopping and smiling.
“No, really!" said the other; and then he looked fixedly at Charles and began to laugh, and Charley, seeing nothing better to do, looked up at the grey eyes and laughed too, and this made the stranger worse; and then, to crown the joke, the general began to laugh too, though none of them had said a syllable more than what I have written down; and at last the ridiculous exhibition finished up by the old gentleman taking a great pinch of snuff from a gold box, and turning away.
Charles was much puzzled, and was still more so when, in an hour’s time, having dressed himself and being on his way downstairs to his aunt’s room, who had just come in, he was stopped on a landing by this same old gentleman, beautifully dressed for dinner, who looked on him as before.
He didn’t laugh this time, but he did worse. He utterly “dumbfoundered” Charley by asking abruptly —
“How’s Jim?”
“He is very well, thank you, sir. His wife Norah nursed me when mamma died.”
“Oh, indeed,” said the other; “so he hasn’t cut your father’s throat yet, or anything of that sort?”
“Oh dear no,” said Charles, horrified; “bless you, what can make you think of such things? Why, he is the kindest man in the world.”
“I don’t know,” said the old gentleman, thoughtfully;
“that excessively faithful kind of creature is very apt to do that sort of thing. I should discharge any servant of mine who exhibited the slightest symptoms of affection as a dangerous lunatic; “with which villainous sentiment he departed.
Charles thought what a strange old gentleman he was for a short time, and then slid down the banisters. They were better banisters than those at Ravenshoe, being not so steep, and longer: so he went up, and slid down again;* after which he knocked at his aunt’s door.
It was with a beating heart that he waited for an answer. Cuthbert had described Lady Ascot as such a horrid old ogress, that he was not without surprise when a cheery voice said, “Come in,” and, entering a handsome room, he found himself in presence of a noble-looking old lady, with grey hair, who was netting in an upright, old-fashioned chair.
“So you are Charles Ravenshoe, eh?” she began. “Why, my dear, you must be perished with cold and hunger. I should have come in before, but I didn’t expect you so soon. Tea will be here directly. You ain’t a beauty, my dear, but I think I shall like you. There never was but one really handsome Ravenshoe, and that was poor Petre, your grandfather. Poor Alicia made a great fool of herself, but she was very happy with him. Welter, you naughty boy, be still.”
* The best banisters for sliding down are broad oak ones, with a rib in the middle. This new narrow sort, which is coming in, are wretched.
The Right Honourable Viscount “Welter wanted his tea, and was consequently troublesome and fractious. He had picked a quarrel with his grandmother’s terrier, which he averred had bitten him in the leg, and he was now heating the poker, in order, he informed the old lady, to burn the place out, and prevent hydrophobia. Whether he would have done so or not, we shall never know now, for, tea coming in at that moment, he instantly sat down at table, and called to Charles to do likewise.
“Call Miss Adelaide, will you, Sims?” said Lord Ascot; and presently there came tripping into the room the loveliest little blonde fairy, about ten years old, that ever you saw. She fixed her large blue eyes on Charley, and then came up and gave him a kiss, which he, the rogue, returned with interest, and then, taking her seat at the table, she turned to Welter, and hoped he was going to be good.
Such, however, it soon appeared, was not his lordship’s intention. He had a guest at table, and he was bound in honour to show off before him, besides having to attend to his ordinary duty of frightening his grandmother as nearly into fits as was safe. Accordingly, he began the repast by cramming buns into his mouth, using the handle of his knife as a rammer, until the salvation of his life appeared an impossibility, at which point he rose and left the room with a rapid, uneven step. On his reappearance he began drinking, but, having caught his grandmother’s eye over his teacup, he inked at her, and then held his breath till he was purple, and she begun to wring her hands in despair. All this time he was stimulated by Charles’s laughter and Adelaide’s crying out, continually, “Oh, isn’t he a naughty boy, Lady Ascot? oh, do tell him not to do it.” But the crowning performance of this promising young gentleman — the feat which threw everything else into the shade, and which confirmed Charley in his admiration of his profound talents — was this. Just as a tall, grave, and handsome footman was pouring water into the teapot, and while her ladyship was inspecting the operation with all the intense interest of an old tea-maker, at that moment did Lord Welter contrive to inflict on the unfortunate man a pinch on the leg, of such a shrewdly agonising nature as caused him to gnash his teeth in Lady Ascot’s face, to cry aloud, “Oh, Lord!” to whirl the kettle within an inch of her venerable nose, and finally, to gyrate across the room on one leg, and stand looking like the king of fools.
Lady Ascot, who had merely seen the effect, and not the cause, ordered him promptly to leave the room, whereupon “Welter explained, and afterwards continued to Charles, with an offhand candour quite his own, as if no such person as his grandmother was within a hundred miles —
“You know, Charley, I shouldn’t dare to behave like this if my tutor was at home; she’d make nothing of telling him, now. She’s in a terrible wax, but she’ll be all right by the time he comes back from his holidays; won’t you, grandma?”
“You wicked boy,” she replied, “I hope Hawtrey will cure you; Keate would have, I know.”
The boys slid on the banisters; then they went to dessert. Then they went upstairs, and looked over Welter’s cricket apparatus, fishing tackle, and so on; and then they went into the billiard-room, which was now lighted up and full of guests.
There were two tables in the room, at one of which a pool was getting up, while the other was empty. Welter was going to play pool, and Charles would have liked to do so too, being a very tolerable player; only he had promised his old tutor not to play for money till he was eighteen, and so he sat in the corner by the empty table, under the marking-board, with one leg gathered under him, and instantly found himself thinking about the little girl he had seen upstairs.
Once or twice he was surprised to find himself thinking so much about her, but he found it a pleasant subject, too, for he had sat in his corner more than half an hour without changing it, when he became aware that two men were taking down cues from the rack, and were going to play at his table.
They were his two friends of the afternoon, General Mainwaring and the grey-headed man who laughed. When they saw him they seemed glad, and the old gentleman asked him why he wasn’t playing.
“I musn’t play pool,” he answered. “I should like to mark for you.”
“Well said, my hero,” said the general: “and so Jim’s an honest man, is he?”
Charles saw that the old gentleman had told the general what had passed on the stairs, and wondered why he should take such an interest in him; but he soon fell to thinking about little Adelaide again, and marking mechanically though correctly.
He was aroused by the general’s voice — “Who did you mark that last miss to, my little man?” he said.
“To the old gentleman,” said Charles, and then blushed at the consciousness of having said a rude thing.
“That is one for you, Methusaleh,” said the general.
“Never mind,” said the old gentleman, “I have one great source of pride, which no one can rob me of; I am twelve years older than I look.”
They went on playing. “By-the-by,” said the general, “who is that exceedingly pretty child that the old lady has got with her?”
“A child she has adopted,” said the old gentleman. “A granddaughter of an old friend who died in poverty. She is a noble-hearted old soul, the jockey, with all her absurdities.”
“Who was she?” said the general. “(That was rather a fluke, was it not? ) ”
“She? Why, a daughter of old Cingle Headstall’s, the mad old Cheshire baronet — you don’t remember him, of course, but your father knew him. Drove his tandem round and round Berkeley Square for four hours on a foggy night, under the impression he was going home to Hounslow, and then fired at the watchman who tried to put him right, taking him for a highwayman. The son went to France, and was lost sight of in the revolution; so the girl came in for what money there was: not very much, I take it. This poor thing, who was pretty and clever enough, but without education, having been literally brought up in a stable, captivated the sagacious Ascot, and made him a capital wife.”
“I suppose she’ll portion this girl, then; you say she had money?”
“H’m,” said the old gentleman, “there’s a story about the aforesaid money, which is told in different ways, but which amounts to this, that the money is no more. Hallo, our marker is getting sleepy.”
“Not at all, sir,” said Charles. “If you will excuse me a moment I will come back.”
He ran across to Lord Welter, who was leaning on his cue. “Can you tell me,” said he, “who is that old gentleman? ”
“Which old gentleman?”
“That one, with the black eyebrows, playing with General Mainwaring. There, he is taking snuff.”
“Oh, him?” said Welter; “that is Lord Saltire.”
Time, the inexorable, kept mowing away at poor Charles’s flowers until the disagreeable old creature had cut them all down but two or three, and mowed right into the morning when it was necessary that he should go home; and then Charles, looking forward through his tears, could see nothing at first but the very commonest grass. For was he not going to leave Adelaide, probably never to see her again? In short, Charles was in love, and going to separate from the object of his affections for the first time; at which I request you will not laugh, but just reflect how old you were yourself when you first fell in love.
The little flirt, she must have waited till she heard him coming out of his room, and then have pretended to be coming upstairs all in a hurry. He got a kiss or a dozen, though, and a lock of hair, I believe; but he hadn’t much time to think about it, for Lord Ascot was calling out for him, and when he got into the hall, there was all the household to see him off. Everybody had a kind word for him; the old lady cried; Lord Saltire and the general shook hands; Lord Welter said it was a beastly sell; and Lord Ascot hummed and awed, and told him to tell his father he had been a good boy. They were all sorry he was going, and he felt as though he was leaving old friends; but the carriage was there, and the rain was pouring down; and, with one last look at the group of faces, he was in the carriage and away.
It was a terrible day, though he did not notice it at first. He was thinking how pleasant it was that the people were all so kind to him, just as kind as they were at home. He thought of Adelaide, and wondered whether she would ever think of him. He was rather glad that Welter was such a naughty boy (not really naughty, you know), because she would be less likely to like him. And then he thought how glad the people at home would be to see him; and then he looked out of window. He had left Lord Ascot’s carriage and got into the train some time before this. Now he saw that the train was going very slowly, and nothing was visible through the driving rain. Then he tried to remember whether he had ever heard his father speak of Lord Saltire, and what he had heard about him; and, thinking about this, the train stopped. — Swindon.
He got out to go to the refreshment room, and began wondering what the noise was which prevented him from hearing any one when they spoke, and why the people looked scared and talked in knots. Then he found that it was the wind in the roof; and some one told him that a chimney had been blown across the line, and they must wait till it was removed.
All the day the brave engine fought westward against the wind, and two hours after time Charles found himself in the coach which would take him to Stonnington. The night crept on, and the coach crawled on its way through the terrible night, and Charles slept. In the cold pitiless morning, as they were going over a loftily exposed moor, the coach, though only going foot’s pace, stood for an instant on two wheels, and then fell crashing over on to a heap of roadside stones, awaking Charles, who, being unhurt, lay still for a minute or so, with a faint impression of having been shaken in his sleep, and, after due reflection, made the brilliant discovery that the coach was upset.
He opened the door over his head and jumped out. For an instant he was blinded by the stinging rain, but turned his back to it; and then, for the first time, he became aware that this was the most terrible gale of wind he had ever seen in his lifetime.
He assisted the coachman and guard, and the solitary outside passenger, to lead the poor horses along the road. They fought on for about two hundred yards, and came to an alehouse, on the sight of which Charles knew that they were two stages short of where he thought they had been, for this was the Watershed Inn, and the rain from its roof ran partly into the Bristol Channel and partly into the British.
After an hour’s rest here Charles was summoned to join the coach in the valley below, and they crawled on again. It was a weary day over some very bleak country. They saw in one place a cottage unroofed on a moor, and the terrified family crouched down beneath the tottering walls. In the valleys great trees were down across the road, which were crosscut and moved by country men, who told of oaks of three hundred years, fallen in the night, and of corn stacks hurried before the blast like the leaves of autumn. Still, as each obstacle was removed, there was the guard up blowing his horn cheerily, and Charles was inside with a jump, and on they went.
At last, at three o’clock, the coach drove under the gate of the “Chichester Arms,” at Stonnington, and Charles, jumping out, was received by the establishment with the air of people who had done a clever thing, and were ready to take their meed of praise with humility. The handsome landlady took great credit to herself for Charles’s arrival — so much so, that one would have thought she herself had single-handed dragged the coach from Exeter. “She had been sure all along that Mr. Charles would come.” A speech winch, with the cutting glance that accompanied it, goaded the landlord to retort in a voice wheezy with good living, and to remind her that she had said, not ten minutes before, that she was quite sure he wouldn’t; whereupon the landlady loftily begged him not to expose himself before the servants. At winch the landlord laughed, and choked himself; at which the landlady slapped him on the back, and laughed too; after which they went in.
His father, the landlord told him, had sent his pony over, as he was afraid of a carriage on the moor today, and that, if he felt at all afraid to come on, he was to sleep where he was. Charles looked at the comfortable parlour and hesitated; but, happening to close his eyes an instant, he saw as plain as possible the library at home, and the flickering firelight falling on the crimson and oak furniture, and his father listening for him through the roaring wind; and so he hesitated no longer, but said he would push on, and that he would wish to see his servant while he took dinner.
The landlord eyed him admiringly with his head on one side, and proceeded to remark that corn was down another shilling; that Squire West had sold his chesnut mare for one hundred and twenty pounds; and that if he kept well under the walls going home he would be out of the wind; that his missis was took poorly in the night with spasms, and had been cured by two wine-glasses of peppermint; that a many chimney-pots was blown down, and that old Jim Baker had heard tell as a pig was blowed through the church window. After which he poked the fire and retired.
Charles was hard at his dinner when his man came in. It was the oldest of the pad grooms — a man with grizzled hair, looking like a white terrier; and he stood before him smoothing his face with his hand.
“Hallo, Michael,” said Charley, “how came you to come?”
“Master wouldn’t send no other, sir. It’s a awful day own there; there’s above a hundred trees down along the road.”
“Shall we be able to get there?”
“As much as we shall, sir.”
“Let us try. Terrible sea, I suppose?”
“Awful to look at, sir. Mr. Mackworth and Mr. Cuthbert are down to look at it.”
“No craft ashore?”
“None as yet. None of our boats is out. Yesterday morning a Pill boat, 52, stood in to see where she was and beat out again, but that was before it came on so bad.”
So they started. They pushed rapidly out of the town, and up a narrow wooded valley which led to the moor which lay between them and Ravenshoe. For some time they were well enough sheltered, and made capital way, till the wood began to grow sparer, and the road to rise abruptly. Here the blast began to be more sensibly felt, and in a quarter of a mile they had to leap three uprooted trees; before them they heard a rushing noise like the sea. It was the wind upon the moor.
Creeping along under the high stone walls and bending down, they pushed on still, until, coming to the open moor, and receiving for the first time the terrible tornado full in their faces, the horses reared up and refused to proceed; but, being got side by side, and their heads being homeward, they managed to get on, though the rain upon their faces was agonising.
As they were proceeding thus, with Michael on the indward side, Charles looked up, and there was another horseman beside him. He knew him directly; it was Lloyd’s agent.
“Anything wrong, Mr. Lewis? Any ship ashore?” he shouted.
“Not yet, sir,” said the agent. “But there’ll be many a good sailor gone to the bottom before tomorrow morning, I am thinking. This is the heaviest gale for forty years.”
By degrees they descended to more sheltered valleys, and after a time found themselves in the courtyard of the hall. Charles was caught up by his father; Lloyd’s agent was sent to the housekeeper’s room; and very soon Charles had forgotten all about wind and weather, and was pouring into his father’s ear all his impressions of Ranford.
“I am glad you like it,” said Densil, “and I’ll be bound they liked you. You ought to have gone first; Cuthbert don’t suit them.”
“Oh, Cuthbert’s too clever for them,” said Charles; "they are not at all clever people, bless you!" And only just in time too, for Cuthbert walked into the room.
“Well, Charley,” he said coolly, “so you’re come back. Well, and what did you think of Welter, eh? I suppose he suited you?”
“I thought him very funny, Cuthbert,” said Charles timidly.
“I thought him an abominable young nuisance,” said Cuthbert. “I hope he hasn’t taught you any of his fool’s tricks.”
Charles wasn’t to be put off like this; so he went and kissed his brother, and then came back to his father. There was a long dull evening, and when they went to complines, he went to bed. Up in his room he could hear that the wind was worse than ever, not rushing up in great gusts and sinking again, as in ordinary gales, but keeping up one continued unvarying scream against the house, which was terrible to hear.
He got frightened at being alone; afraid of finding some ghostly thing at his elbow, which had approached him unheard through the noise. He began, indeed, to meditate upon going down stairs, when Cuthbert, coming into the next room, reassured him, and he got into bed.
This wasn’t much better though, for there was a thing in a black hood came and stood at the head of his bed; and, though he could not see it, he could feel the wind of its heavy draperies as it moved. Moreover, a thing like a caterpillar, with a cat’s head, about two feet long, came creep-creeping up the counterpane; which he valiantly smote, and found it to be his handkerchief — and still the unvarying roar went on till it was unendurable.
He got up and went to his brother’s room, and was cheered to find a light burning; he came softly in and called “ Cuthbert,”
“Who is there?” asked he, with a sudden start.
“It’s I,” said Charles; “can you sleep?”
“Not I,” said Cuthbert, sitting up. “I can hear people talking in the wind. Come into bed; I’m so glad you’re come.”
Charles lay down by his brother, and they talked about ghosts for a long time. Once their father came in with a light from his bedroom next door, and sat on the bed talking, as if he, too, was glad of company, and after that they dozed off and slept.
It was in the grey light of morning that they awoke together and started up. The wind was as bad as ever, but the whole house was still, and they stared terrified at one another,
“What was it?” whispered Charles.
Cuthbert shook his head and listened again. As he was opening his mouth to speak it came again, and they knew it was that which woke them. A sound like a single footstep on the floor above, light enough, but which shook the room. Cuthbert was out of bed in an instant, tearing on his clothes. Charles jumped out too, and asked him, “What is it? ”
“A gun!”
Charles well knew what awful disaster was implied in those words. The wind was N.W., setting into the bay. The ship that fired that gun was doomed.
He heard his father leap out of bed and ring furiously at his bell. Then doors began to open and shut, and voices and rapid footsteps were heard in the passage. In ten minutes the whole terrified household were running hither and thither, about they hardly knew hat. The men were pale, and some of the women were beginning to whimper and wring their hands; when Densil; Lewis the agent, and Mackworth, came rapidly down the staircase and passed out. Mackworth came back, and told the women to put on hot water and heat blankets. Then Cuthbert joined him, and they went together; and directly after Charles found himself between two menservants, being dragged rapidly along towards the low headland which bounded the bay on the east.
When they came to the beach, they found the whole village pushing on in a long straggling line the same way as themselves. The men were walking singly, either running, or going very fast; and the women wore in knots of twos and threes, straggling along and talking excitedly, with much gesticulation.
“There’s some of the elect on board, I’ll be bound,” Charles heard one woman say, “as will be supping in glory this blessed night.”
“Ay, ay,” said an old woman, “I’d sooner be taken to rest sudden, like they’re going to be, than drag on till all the faces you know are gone before.”
“My boy,” said another, “was lost in a typhoon in the China sea. Darn they lousy typhoons! I wonder if he thought of his mother afore he went down.”
Among such conversation as this, with the terrible, ceaseless thunder of the surf upon his left, Charles, clinging tight to his two guardians, made the best weather of it he could, until they found themselves on the short turf of the promontory, with their faces seaward, and the water right and left of them. The cape ran out about a third of a mile, rather low, and then abruptly ended in a cone of slate, beyond which, about two hundred yards at sea, was that terrible sunken rock, “the Wolf,” on to which, as sure as death, the flowing tide carried every stick which was embayed. The tide was making; a ship was known to be somewhere in the bay; it was blowing a hurricane; and what would you more?
They hurried along as well as they could among the sharp slates which rose through the turf, until they came to where the people had halted. Charles saw his father, the agent, Mackworth, and Cuthbert together, under a rock; the villagers were standing around, and the crowd was thickening every moment. Every one had his hand over his eyes, and was peering due to windward, through the driving scud.
They had stopped at the foot of the cone, which was between them and the sea, and some more adventurous had climbed partly up it, if, perhaps, they might see further than their fellows; but in vain: they all saw and heard the same — a blinding white cauldron of wind-driven spray below, and all around, filling every cranny — the howling storm.
A quarter of an hour since she fired last, and no signs of her yet. She must be carrying canvas and struggling for life, ignorant of the four-knot stream. Some one says she may have gone down — hush! who spoke?
Old Sam Evans had spoken. He had laid his hand on the squire’s shoulder, and said, “There she is.” And hen arose a hubbub of talking from the men, and every one crowded on his neighbour and tried to get nearer. And the women moved hurriedly about, some moaning to themselves, and some saying, “Ah, poor dear!” “Ah, dear Lord, there she is, sure enough.”
She hove in sight so rapidly that, almost as soon as they could be sure of a dark object, they saw that it was a ship — a great .ship about 900 tons; that she was dismasted, and that her decks were crowded. I could see that she was unmanageable, turning her head hither and thither as the sea struck her, and that her people had seen the cliff at the same moment, for they were hurrying aft, and crowding on to the bulwarks.
Charles and his guardians crept up to his father’s party. Densil was standing silent, looking on the lamentable sight; and, as Charles looked at him, he saw a tear run down his cheek, and heard him say, “Poor fellows!” Cuthbert stood staring intently at the ship, with his lips slightly parted. Mackworth, like one who studies a picture, held his elbow in one hand, and kept the other over his mouth; and the agent cried out, “A troop-ship, by gad. Dear! dear! ”
It is a sad sight to see a fine ship beyond control. It is like seeing one one loves gone mad. Sad under any circumstances; how terrible it is when she is bearing on with her in her mad Bacchante’s dance a freight of living human creatures, to untimely destruction!
As each terrible feature and circumstance of the catastrophe became apparent to the lookers-on, the excitement became more intense. Forward and in the waist, there was a considerable body of seamen clustered about under the bulwarks — some half-stripped. In front of the cuddy door, between the poop and the mainmast, about forty soldiers were drawn up, with whom were three officers, to be distinguished by their blue coats and swords. On the quarter-deck were seven or eight women, two apparently ladies, one of whom carried a baby. A well-dressed man, evidently the captain, was with them; but the cynosure of all eyes was a tall man in white trousers, at once and correctly judged to be the mate, who carried in his arms a little girl.
The ship was going straight upon the rock, now only marked as a whiter spot upon the whitened sea, and she was fearfully near it, rolling and pitching, turning her head hither and thither, fighting for her life. She had taken comparatively little water on board as yet; but now a great sea struck her forward, and she swung with her bow towards the rock, from which she was distant not a hundred yards. The end was coming. Charles saw the mate slip off his coat and shirt, and take the little girl again. He saw the lady with the baby rise very quietly and look forward; he saw the sailors climbing on the bulwarks; he saw the soldiers standing steady in two scarlet lines across the deck; he saw the officers wave their hands to one another, and then he id his face in his hands, and sobbed as if his heart would break.
They told him after how the end had come; she had lifted up her bows defiantly, and brought them crashing down upon the pitiless rock as though in despair. Then her stern had swung round, and a merciful sea broke over her, and hid her from their view, though above the storm they plainly heard her brave old timbers crack; then she floated off, with bulwarks gone, sinking, and drifted out of sight round the headland, and, though they raced across the headland, and waited a few breathless minutes for her to float round into sight again, they never saw her any more. The Warren Hastings had gone down in fifteen fathom. And now there was a new passion introduced into the tragedy, to which it had hitherto been a stranger — Hope. The wreck of part of the mainmast and half the main-topmast, which they had seen, before she struck, lumbering the deck, had floated off, and there were three, four, five men clinging to the futtock shrouds; and then, they saw the mate with the child hoist himself on to the spar, and part his dripping hair from his eyes.
The spar had floated into the bay, into which they were looking, into much calmer water; but, directly to leeward, the swell was tearing at the black slate rocks, and in ten minutes it would be on them. Every man saw the danger, and Densil, running down to the water’s edge, cried —
“Fifty pound to any one who will take ’em a ope! Fifty gold sovereigns down tonight! Who’s going?”
Jim Matthews was going, and had been going before he heard of the fifty pound — that was evident; for he was stripped, and out on the rocks with the rope round his waist. He stepped from the bank of slippery seaweed into the heaving water, and then his magnificent limbs were in full battle with the tide. A roar announced his success. As he was seen clambering on to the spar, a stouter rope was paid out; and very soon it and its burden were high and dry upon the little half-moon of sand which ended the bay.
Five sailors, the first mate, and a bright-eyed little girl were their precious prize. The sailors lay about upon the sand, and the mate, untying the shawl that bound her to him, put the silent and frightened child into the hands of a woman who stood close by.
The poor little thing was trembling in every limb. “If you please,” she said to the woman, “I should like to go to mamma. She is standing with baby on the quarter-deck. Mr. Archer, will you take me back to mamma, please? She will be frightened if we stay away.”
“Well, a deary me,” said the honest woman, “she’ll break my heart, a darling; mamma’s in heaven, my tender, and baby too.”
“No, indeed,” said the child, eagerly; “she’s on the quarter-deck. Mr. Archer, Mr. Archer!”
The mate, a tall, brawny, whiskerless, hard-faced an, about six-and-twenty, who had been thrust into a pea-coat, now approached.
“Where’s mamma, Mr. Archer?” said the child.
“Where’s mamma, my ladybird? Oh, dear! oh, dear!”
“And where’s the ship, and Captain Dixon, and the soldiers?”
“The ship, my pretty love,” said the mate, putting his rough hand on the child’s wet hair; “why the good ship, Warren Hastings, Dixon master, is a-sunk beneath the briny waves, my darling; and all on board of her, being good sailors and brave soldiers, is doubtless at this moment in glory.”
The poor little thing set up a low wailing cry, which went to the hearts of all present; then the women carried her away, and the mate, walking between Mackworth and Densil, headed the procession homeward to the hall.
“She was the Warren Hastings, of 900 tons,” he said, “from Calcutta, with a detachment of the 120th on board. The old story — dismasted, both anchors down, cables parted, and so on. And now I expect you know as much as I do. This little girl is daughter to Captain Corby, in command of the troops. She was always a favourite of mine, and I determined to get her through. How steady those sojers stood, by jingo, as though they were on parade. Well, I always th ought something was going to happen, for we had never a quarrel the whole voyage, and that’s curious with troops. Capital row, too. Ah, well, they arc comfortable enough now, eh, sir?”
That night the mate arose from his bed like a giant refreshed with wine, and posted off to Bristol to “her owners,” followed by a letter from Densil, and another from Lloyd’s agent, of such a nature that he found himself in command of a ship in less than a month. Periodically, unto this day, there arrive at Raven shoe, bows and arrows (supposed to be poisoned), paddles, punkahs, rice-paper screens; a malignant kind of pickle, which causeth the bowels of him that eateth of it to burn; wicked-looking old gods of wood and stone; models of Juggernaut’s car; brown earthenware moon-shees, translating glazed porcelain bibles; and many other Indian curiosities, all of which are imported and presented by the kind-hearted Archer.
In a fortnight the sailors were gone, and save a dozen or so of new graves in the churchyard, nothing remained to tell of the Warren Hastings but the little girl saved so miraculously — little Mary Corby.
She had been handed over at once to the care of the kind-hearted Norah, Charles’s nurse, who instantaneously loved her with all her great warm heart, and about three weeks after the wreck gave Charles these particulars about her, when he went to pay her a visit in the cottage behind the kennels.
After having hugged him violently, and kissed him till he laughingly refused to let her do it again till she had told him the news, she began — “The beauty-boy, 'e gets handsomer every day ” (this might be true, but there was great room for improvement yet), “and comes and sees his old nurse, and who loves him so well, alanna? It’s little I can tell ye about the little girl, me darlin’. She’s nine years old, and a heretic, like yer own darlin’ self, and who’s to gainsay ye from it? She’s book-learned enough, and play she says she can, and I axed her would she like to live in the great house, and she said no. She liked me, and wanted to stay with me. She cries about her mother, a dear, but not so much as she did, and she’s now inside and asleep. Come here, quick.”
She bent down her handsome face to Charles’s ear, and whispered, “If my boy was looking out for a little wee fairy wife, eh?”
Charles shook his hair, and laughed, and there and then told Norah all about Adelaide, which attachment Norah highly approved of, and remarked that he’d be old enough to be married before he knew where he was.
In spite of Densil’s letters and inquiries, no friends came forward to claim little Mary. Uncle Corby, when in possession of facts, was far too much a man of business to do anything of the kind. In a very short time Densil gave up inquiring, and then he began dreading lest she should be taken from him, for he had got wonderfully fond of the quiet, pale, bright-eyed little creature. In three months she was considered as a permanent member of the household, and the night before Charles went to school he told her of his grand passion. His lordship considered this step showed deep knowledge of the world, as it would have the effect of crashing in the bud any rash hopes which Mary might have conceived; and, having made this provision for her peace of mind, he straightway departed to Shrewsbury school.
It is a curious sensation, that of meeting, as a young man of two or three and twenty, a man one has last seen as a little lad of ten, or thereabouts. One is almost in a way disappointed. You may be asked out to dinner to meet a man called, say, Jones (or if you like the name better, Delamere D’Eresby), whom you believe to be your old friend Jones, and whom you have not seen for a month or so; and on getting to the house find it is not your Jones at all, but another Jones whom you don’t know. He may be cleverer, handsomer, more agreeable than your old friend — a man whom you are glad to know; and yet you are disappointed. You don’t meet the man you expected, and are rather disposed to be prejudiced against his representative.
So it is when you meet a friend in manhood whom you have not seen since you were at school. You have been picturing to yourself the sort of man your friend must have developed into, and you find him different from what you thought. So, instead of foregathering with an old friend, you discover that you have to make a new acquaintance.
You will now have to resume the acquaintance of Charles Ravenshoe at two and twenty. I hope you will not be much disappointed in him. He was a very nice boy, if you remember, and you will see immediately that he has developed into a very nice young man indeed. It is possible that I may not be about to introduce him to you under the most favourable circumstances; but he created those circumstances for himself, and must abide by them. As it is not my intention to follow him through any part of his University life, but only to resume his history when he quits it, so it becomes imperatively necessary upon me to state, without any sort of disguise, the reason why he did leave it. And, as two or three other important characters in the story had something to do with it, I shall do so more at length than would at first seem necessary.
It was nine o’clock on the 6th of November. The sun, which had been doing duty for her Majesty all night at Calcutta, Sydney, &c, had by this time reached Oxford, and was shining aslant into two pretty little Gothic windows in the inner, or library quadrangle of St. Paul’s College, and illuminating the features of a young man who was standing in the middle of the room and scratching his head.
He was a stout-built fellow, not particularly handsome, but with a very pleasing face. His hair was very dark brown, short, and curling; his forehead was broad and open, and below it were two uncommonly pleasant-looking dark grey eyes. His face was rather marked, is nose very slightly aquiline, and plenty of it, his mouth large and good-humoured, which, when opened to laugh, as it very frequently was, showed a splendid set of white teeth, which were well contrasted with a fine healthy brown and red complexion. Altogether a very pleasant young fellow to look on, and looking none the worse just now, for an expression of droll perplexity, not unmixed with a certain amount of terror, which he had on his face.
It was Charles Ravenshoe.
He stood in his shirt and trousers only, in the midst of a scene of desolation so awful, that I who have had to describe some of the most terrible scenes and circumstances conceivable, pause, before attempting to give any idea of it in black and white. Every moveable article in the room — furniture, crockery, fender, fire-irons — lay in one vast heap of broken confusion in the corner of the room. Not a pane of glass remained in the windows; the bedroom door was broken down; and the door which opened into the corridor was minus the two upper panels. Well might Charles Ravenshoe stand there and scratch his head.
“By George,” he said at last, soliloquising, “how deuced lucky it is that I never get drunk. If I had been screwed last night, those fellows would have burnt the college down. What a devil that Welter is when he gets drink into him; and Marlow is not much better. The fellows were mad with fighting, too. I wish thev hadn’t come here and made hay afterwards. There’ll be an awful row about this. It’s all up, I am afraid. It’s impossible to say, though.”
At this moment, a man appeared in the passage, and, looking in through the broken door, as if from a witness-box, announced, “Tbe dean wishes to see you at once, sir.” And exit.
Charles replied by using an expression then just coming into use among our youth, “All serene!” dressed himself by putting on a pilot coat, a pair of boots, and a cap and gown, and with a sigh descended into the quadrangle.
There were a good many men about, gathered in groups. The same subject was in everybody’s mouth. There had been, the night before, without warning or apparent cause, the most frightful disturbance which, in the opinion of the porter, had graced the college for fifty years. It had begun suddenly at half-past twelve, and had been continued till three. The dons had been afraid to come and interfere, the noise was so terrible. Five out-college men had knocked out at a quarter to three, refusing to give any name but the dean’s. A rocket had been let up, and a five-barrel revolver had been let off, and — Charles Ravenshoe had been sent for.
A party of young gentlemen, who looked very seedy and guilty, stood in his way, and as he came up shook their heads sorrowfully; one, a tall one, with large whiskers, sat down in the gravel walk, and made as though he would have cast dust upon his head.
“This is a bad job, Charley,” said one of them.
“Some heads must fall,” said Charles; “I hope mine is not among the number. Rather a shame if it is, eh?”
The man with the big whiskers shook his head. “The state of your room,” he said.
“Who has seen it?” eagerly asked Charles.
“Sleeping innocent,” replied the other, “the porter was up there by eight o’clock, and at half-past the dean himself was gazing on your unconscious face as you lay peacefully sleeping in the arms of desolation.”
Charles whistled long and loud, and proceeded with a sinking heart towards the dean’s rooms.
A tall pale man, with a hard, marked countenance, was sitting at his breakfast, who, as soon as he saw his visitor, regarded him with the greatest interest, and buttered a piece of toast.
“Well, Mr. Ravenshoe,” was his remark.
“I believe you sent for me, sir,” said Charles, adding to himself, “Confound you, you cruel old brute, you are amusing yourself with my tortures.”
“This is a pretty business,” said the dean.
Charles would be glad to know to what he alluded.
“Well,” said the dean, laughing, “I don’t exactly know where to begin. However, I am not sure it much matters. You will be wanted in the common room at two. The proctor has sent for your character also. Altogether, I congratulate you. Your career at the University has been brilliant; but, your orbit being highly elliptical, it is to be feared that you will remain but a short time above the horizon. Good morning”
Charles rejoined the eager knot of friends outside; and, when he spoke the awful word “common room,” every countenance wore a look of dismay. Five more, it appeared, were sent for, and three were wanted by the proctor at eleven. It was a disastrous morning,
There was a large breakfast in the rooms of the man with the whiskers, to which all the unfortunates were of course going. One or two were in a state of badly concealed terror, and fidgetted and were peevish, until they got slightly tipsy. Others laughed a good deal, rather nervously, and took the thing pluckily — the terror was there, but they fought against it; but the behaviour of Charles extorted applause from everybody. He was as cool and as merry as if he was just going down for the long vacation; he gave the most comical account of the whole proceedings last night from beginning to end, as he was well competent to do, being the only sober man who had witnessed them; he ate heartily and laughed naturally, to the admiration of every one.
One of the poor fellows who had shown greatest signs of terror, and who was as near crying as he could possibly be without actually doing so, looked up and complimented him on his courage, with an oath.
“In me, my dear Dick,” said Charles, good-naturedly, you see the courage of despair. Had I half your chances I should be as bad as you. I know there are but a few more ceremonies to be gone through, and then — ”
The other rose and leit the room. “Well,” said he, as he went, with a choking voice, “I expect my old governor will cut his throat, or something; I’m fifteen hundred in debt.” And so the door closed on the poor lad, and the party was silent.
There came in now a young man, to whom I wish especially to call your attention. He was an ordinary young man enough, in the morning livery of a groom. He was a moderately well-looking fellow, and there seems at first nothing in any way remarkable about him. But look at him again, and you are struck with a resemblance to some one you know, and yet at first you hardly know to whom. It is not decidedly, either, in any one feature, and you are puzzled for a time, till you come to the conclusion that everyone else does. That man is a handsome likeness of Charles Ravenshoe.
This is Charles’s foster-brother William, whom we saw on a former occasion taking refreshment with that young gentleman, and who had for some time been elevated to the rank of Mr. Charles’s “lad.” He had come for orders.
There were no orders but to exercise the horses, Charles believed; he would tell him in the afternoon if there were, he added sorrowfully.
“I saw Lord Welter coining away from the proctor’s, sir,” said William, “He told me to ask what train you were going down by. His lordship told me to say, sir, that Lord Welter of Christchurch would leave the University at twelve tomorrow, and would not come into residence again till next Michaelmas term.”
“By Jove,” said Charles, “he has got a dose! I didn’t think they’d have given him a year. Well, here goes.”
Charles went to the proctor’s, but his troubles there were not so severe as he had expected. He had been seen fighting several times during the evening, but half the University had been doing the same. He had been sent home three times, and had reappeared; that was nothing so very bad. On his word of honour he had not tripped up the marshal; Brown himself thought he must have slipped on a piece of orange peel. Altogether it came to this; that Ravenshoe of Paul’s had better be in by nine for the rest of term, and mind what he was about for the future.
But the common room at two was the thing by which poor Charles was to stand or fall. There were terrible odds against him — the master and six tutors. It was no use, he said, sniveling, or funking the thing; so he went in to do battle valiantly.
The Master opened the ball, in a voice suggestive of mild remonstrance. In all his experience of college life, extending over a period of forty-five years, he had never even heard of proceedings so insubordinate, so unparalleled, so — so — monstrous, as had taken place the night before, in a college only a twelvemonth ago considered to be the quietest in the University. A work of fiction of a low and vicious tendency, professing to describe scenes of headlong riot and debauchery at the sister University, called, he believed, “Peter Priggins,” had een written, and was, he understood, greatly read by the youth of both seats of learning; but he was given to understand that the worst described in that book sank into nothing, actually dwindled into insignificance, before last night’s proceedings. It appeared, he continued referring to a paper through his gold eye-glasses), that at half-past twelve a band of intoxicated and frantic young men had rushed howling into the college, refusing to give their names to the porter (among whom was recognised Mr. Ravenshoe); that from that moment a scene of brutal riot had commenced in the usually peaceful quadrangle, and had continued till half-past three; loaded weapons had been resorted to, and fireworks had been exhibited; and, finally, that five members of another college had knocked out at half-three, stating to the poller (without the slightest foundation) that they had been having tea with the dean. Now you know, really and truly, it simply resolved itself into this. Were they going to keep St. Paul’s College open, or were they not? If the institution which had flourished now for above five hundred years was to continue to receive undergraduates, the disturbers of last night must be sternly eliminated. In the last case of this kind, where a man was only convicted of — eh, Mr. Dean? — pump handle — thank you — was only convicted of playfully secreting the handle of the college pump, rustication had been inflicted. In this case the college would do its duty, however painful. iaries was understood to say that he was quite sober, and had tried to keep the fellows out of mischief.
The Master believed Mr. Ravenshoe would hardly deny having let off a rocket on the grass-plat.
Charles was ill advised enough to say that he did it to keep the fellows quiet; but the excuse fell dead, and there was a slight pause. After which,
The Dean rose, with his hands in his pockets, and remarked that this sort of thing was all mighty fine, you know; but they weren’t going to stand it, and the sooner this was understood the better. He, for one, as long as he remained dean of that college, was not going to have a parcel of drunken young idiots making a row under his windows at all hours in the morning. He should have come out himself last night, but that he was afraid, positively afraid, of personal violence; and the odds were too heavy against him. He, for one, did not want more words about it. He allowed the fact of Mr. Ravenshoe being perfectly sober, though whether that could be pleaded in extenuation was very doubtful (Did you speak, Mr. Bursar? No. I beg pardon, I thought you did.) He proposed that Mr. Ravenshoe should be rusticated for a year, and that the Dean of Christchurch should be informed that Lord Welter was one of the most active of the rioters. That promising young nobleman had done them the honour to create a disturbance in the college on a previous occasion, when he was, as last night, the guest of Mr. Ravenshoe.
Charles said that Lord Welter had been rusticated for a year.
The Dean was excessively glad to hear it, and hoped that he would stay at home and give his family the benefit of his high spirits. As there were five other gentlemen to come before them he would suggest that they should come to a determination.
The Bursar thought that Mr. Ravenshoe’s plea of sobriety should be taken in extenuation. Air. Ravenshoe had never been previously accused of having resorted to stimulants. He thought it should be taken in extenuation.
The Dean was sorry to be of a diametrically opposite opinion.
No one else taking up the cudgels for poor Charles, the Master said he was afraid he must rusticate him.
Charles said he hoped they wouldn’t.
The DEAN gave a short laugh, and said that if that was all he had to say he might as well have held his tongue. And then the Master pronounced sentence of rustication for a year, and Charles, having bowed, withdrew.
Charles returned to his room, a little easier in his mind than when he left it. There still remained one dreadful business to get over — the worst of all; that of letting his father know. Non-University men sneer at rustication; they can’t see any particular punishment in having to absent yourself from your studies for a term or two. But do they think that the Dons don’t know what they are about? Why, nine spirited young fellows out of ten would snap their fingers at rustication, if it wasn’t for the home business. It is breaking the matter to the father, his just anger, and his mother’s still more bitter reproaches. It must all come out, the why and the wherefore, without concealment or palliation. The college write a letter to justify themselves, and then a mine of deceit is sprung under the parents’ feet, and their eyes are opened to things they little dreamt of. This, it appears, is not the first offence. The college has been long-suffering, and has pardoned when it should have punished repeatedly. The lad who was thought to be doing so well, has been leading a dissipated, riotous life, and deceiving them all. This is the bitterest blow they have ever had. How can they ever trust him gain? — And so the wound takes long to heal, and sometimes is never healed at all. That is the meaning of rustication.
A majority of young fellows at the University deceive their parents, especially if they come of serious houses. It is almost forced upon them sometimes, and in all cases the temptation is strong. It is very unwise to ask too many questions. Home questions are, in some cases, unpardonable. A son can’t tell a father, as one man can tell another, to mind his own business. No. The father asks the question suddenly, and the son lies, perhaps, for the first time in his life. If he told the truth his father would knock him down.
Now Charles was a little better off than most young fellows in this respect. He knew his father would scold about the rustication, and still more at his being in debt. He wasn’t much afraid of his father’s anger. They two had always been too familiar to be much afraid of one another. He was much more afraid of the sarcasms of Mackworth, and he not a little dreaded his brother; but with regard to his father he felt but slight uneasiness.
He found his scout and his servant William trying to get the room into some order, but it was hopeless. William looked up with a blank face as he came in, and said —
“We can’t do no good, sir; I’d better go for Herbert’s man, I suppose?”
“You may go, William,” said Charles, “to the stables, nd prepare my horses fur a journey. Ward, you may pack up my things, as I go down tomorrow. I am rusticated.”
They both looked very blank, especially William, who, after a long pause, said —
“I was afraid of something happening yesterday after Hall, when I see my lord — ” here William paused abruptly, and, looking up, touched his head to some one who stood in the doorway.
It was a well-dressed, well-looking young man of about Charles’s age, with a handsome, hairless, florid face, and short, light hair. Handsome though his face was, it was hardly pleasing in consequence of a certain lowering of the eyebrow’s which he indulged in every moment — as often, indeed, as he looked at any one — and also of a slight cynical curl at the corners of the mouth. There was nothing else noticeable about Lord Welter except his appearance of great personal strength, for which he was somewhat famous.
“Hallo, Welter!” shouted Charles, “yesterday was an era in the annals of intoxication. Nobody ever was so drunk as you. I did all I could for you, more fool I, for things couldn’t be worse than they are, and might be better. If I had gone to bed instead of looking after you I shouldn’t have been rusticated.”
“I’m deuced sorry, Charley, I am, ‘pon my soul. It is all my confounded folly, and I shall write to your father and say so. You are coming home with me, of course?”
“By Jove, I never thought of it. That wouldn’t be a bad plan, eh? I might write from Ranford, you know. Yes, I think I’ll say yes. William, you can take the horses over tomorrow. That is a splendid idea of yours. I was thinking of going to London.”
“Hang London in the hunting season,” said Lord Welter. “By George, how the governor will blow up. I wonder what my grandmother will say. Somebody has told her the world is coming to an end next year. I hope there’ll be another Derby. She has cut homoeopathy and taken to vegetable practice. She has deuced near slaughtered her maid with an overdose of Linum Cathartieum, as she calls it. She goes digging about in waste places like a witch, with a big footman to carry the spade. She is a good old body though; hanged if she ain’t.”’
“What does Adelaide think of the change in Lady Ascot’s opinions, medical and religious?”
“She don’t care, bless you. She laughs about the world coming to an end, and, as for the physic, she won’t stand that. She has pretty much her own way with the old lady, I can tell you, and with every one else, as far as that goes. She is an imperious little body; I’m afraid of her. — How do, Marston?”
This was said to a small, neatly-dressed, quiet-looking man, with a shrewd, pleasant face, who appeared at this moment looking very grave. He returned “Welter’s salutation, and that gentleman sauntered out of the room after having engaged Charles to dinner at the Cross at six. The new comer then sat down by Charles, and looked sorrowfully in his face.
“So it has come to this, my poor boy,” said he, “and only two days after our good resolutions. Charley, do you know what Issachar was like?”
“No.”
“He was like a strong ass stooping between two burdens,” replied the other, laughing. “I know somebody who is, oh, so very like him. I know a fellow who could do capitally in the schools and in the world, who is now always either lolling about reading novels, or else flying off in the opposite extreme, and running, or riding, or rowing like a madman. Those are his two burdens, and he is a dear old ass also, whom it is very hard to scold, even when one is furiously angry with him.”
“It’s all true,. Marston; it’s all true as Gospel,” said Charles.
“Look how well you did at Shrewsbury,” continued Marston, “when you were forced to work. And now, you haven’t opened a book for a year. Why don’t you have some object in life, old fellow? Try to be captain of the University Eight or the Eleven; get a good degree; anything. Think of last Easter vacation, Charley. Well, then, 1 won’t Be sure that pot-house work won’t do. What earthly pleasure can there be in herding with men of that class, your inferiors in everything except strength? and you who can talk quite well enough for any society?”
“It ain’t my fault,” broke in Charles, pitcously. “It’s a good deal more the fault of the men I’m with. That Easter vacation business was planned by Welter. He wore a velveteen shooting — coat and knee-breeches, and called himself — ”
“That will do, Charley; I don’t want to hear any of that gentleman’s performances. I entertain the strongest personal dislike for him. He leads you into all your mischief. You often quarrel; why don’t you break with him?”
“I can’t.”
“Because he is a distant relation? Nonsense. Your brother never speaks to him.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Do you owe him money?”
“No, it’s the other way, by Jove! I can’t break with that man. I can’t lose the run of Banford. I must be here. There’s a girl there I care about more than all the world beside; if I don’t see her I shall go mad.”
Marston looked very thoughtful. “You never told me of this,” he said; and she has she has refused you, I suppose?”
“Ay! how did you guess that?”
“By my mother wit. I didn’t suppose that Charles Ravenshoe would have gone on as he has, under other circumstances.”
“I fell in love with her,” said Charley, rocking himself to and fro, “when she was a child. I have never had another love but her; and the last time I left Ranford I asked her — you know — and she laughed in my face, and said we were getting too old for that sort of nonsense. And, when I swore I was in earnest, she only laughed the more. And I’m a desperate beggar, by Jove, and I’ll go and enlist, by Jove.”
“What a brillant idea!” said Marston. “Don’t be a fool, Charley. Is this girl a great lady?”
“Great lady! Lord bless you, no; she’s a dependant, without a sixpence.”
“Begin all over again with her. Let her alone a little. Perhaps you took too much for granted, and offended her. Very likely she has got tired of you. By your own confession you have been making love to her for ten years; that must be a great bore for a girl, you know. I suppose you are thinking of going to Ranford, now?”
“Yes. I am going for a time.”
“The worst place you could go to: much better go home to your father. Yours is a quiet, staid, wholesome house, not such a bear-garden as the other place — but, let us change the subject, I am sent after you.”
“By whom?” Musgrave. The University Eight is going down, and he wants you to row four. The match with Cambridge is made up.”
“Oh, hang it!” said poor Charles; “I can’t show after this business. Get a waterman; do, Marston. They will know all about it by this time.”
“Nay, I want you to come; do come, Charles. I want ou to contrast these men with the fellows you were with last night, and to see what an effect three such gentlemen and scholars as Dixon, Hunt, and Smith have in raising the tone of the men they are thrown among.”
On the barge Charles met the others of the Eight — quiet, staid, gentlemanly men, every one of whom knew what had happened, and was more than usually polite in consequence. Musgrave, the captain, received him with manly courtesy. He was sorry to hear Ravenshoe was going down — had hoped to have had him in the Eight at Easter; however, it couldn’t be helped; hoped to get him at Henley; and so on. The others were very courteous too, and Charles soon began to find that he himself was talking in a different tone of voice, and using different language from that which he would have been using in his cousin’s rooms; and he confessed this to Marston that night.
Meanwhile the University Eight, with the little blue flag at her bows, went rushing down the river on her splendid course. Past heavy barges and fairy skiffs; past men in dingys, who ran high and dry on the bank, to get out of the way; and groups of dandys, who ran with them for a time. And before any man was warm — Iffley. Then across the broad mill-pool, and through the deep crooks, out into the broads, and past the withered beds of reeds which told of coming winter. Bridges, and a rushing lasher — Sandford. No rest here. Out of the dripping well-like lock. Get your oars out and way again, past the yellowing willows, past the long wild grey meadows, swept by the singing autumn wind. Through the swirling curves and eddies, onward under the westering sun towards the woods of Nunenham.
It was so late when they got back, that those few who had waited for them, those faithful few who would wait till midnight to see the Eight come in, could not see them, but heard afar off the measured throb and rush of eight oars as one, as they came with rapid stroke up the darkening reach. Charles and Marston walked home together.
“By George,” said Charles, “I should like to do that and nothing else all my life. What a splendid stroke Musgrave gives you, so marked, and so long, and yet so lively. Oh, I should like to be forced to row every day like the watermen.”
“In six or seven years you would probably row as well as a waterman. At least, I mean, as well as some of the second-rate ones. I have set my brains to learn steering, being a small weak man; but I shall never steer as well as little Tims, who is ten years old. Don’t mistake a means for an end — ”
Charles wouldn’t always stand his friend’s good advice, and he thought he had had too much of it today. So he broke out into sudden and furious rebellion, much to Marston’s amusement, who treasured up every word he said in his anger, and used them afterwards with fearful effect against him.
“I don’t care for you,” bawled Charles; “you’re a greater fool than I am, and be hanged to you. You’re going to spend the best years of your life, and ruin your health, to get a first, A first! A first! Why that miserable little beast, Lock, got a first A fellow who is, take him all in all, the most despicable little wretch I know! If you are very diligent you may raise yourself to Ms level! And, when you have got your precious first, you will find yourself utterly unfit for any trade or profession whatever (except the Church, which you don’t mean to enter). What do you know about modern languages or modern history? If you go into the law, you have got to begin all over again. They won’t take you in the army; they are not such muffs. And this is what you get for your fifteen hundred pounds!”
Charles paused, and Marston clapped his hands and said, “hear! hear!” which made him more angry still.
“I shouldn’t care if I was a waterman. I’m sick of all this pretension and humbug; I’d sooner be anything than what I am, with my debts, and my rustication, and keeping up appearances. I wish I was a billiard marker; I wish I was a jockey; I wish I was Alick Reed’s Novice; I wish I was one of Barclay and Perkins’s draymen. Hang it, I wish I was a cabman! Queen Elizabeth was a wise woman, and she was of my opinion.”
“Did Queen Elizabeth wish she was a cabman?” said Marston gravely.
“No, she didn’t,” said Charles, very tartly. “She ished she was a milkmaid, and I think she was quite right. Now, then!”
“So you would like to be a milkmaid?” said the inexorable Marston. “You had better try another Easter vacation with Welter. Mrs. Sherrat will get you a suit of cast-off clothes from some of the lads. Here’s the ‘ Cross,’ where you dine. Bye, bye!”
John Marston knew, and knew well, nearly every one worth knowing in the University. He did not appear particularly rich; he was not handsome; he was not brilliant in conversation; he did not dress well, though he was always neat; he was not a cricketer, a rower, or a rider; he never spoke at the union; he never gave large parties; no one knew anything about his family; he never betted; and yet he was in the best set in the University.
There was, of course, some reason for this; in fact, there were three good and sufficient reasons, although above I may seem to have exhausted the means of approach to good University society. First, He had been to Eton as a town boy, and had been popular there. Second, He had got one of the great open scholarships. And third, his behaviour had always been most correct and gentlemanly.
A year before this he had met Charles as a freshman in Lord Welter’s rooms, and had conceived a great liking for him. Charles had just come up with a capital name from Shrewsbury, and Marston hoped that he would have done something; but no. Charles took up with riding, rowing, driving, &c. &c, not to mention the giving and receiving of parties, with all the zest of a young fellow with a noble constitution, enough money, agreeable manners, and the faculty of excelling to a certain extent in every sport he took in hand.
He very soon got to like and respect Marston. He used to allow him to blow him up, and give him good advice when he wouldn’t take it from any one else. The night before he went down Marston came to his rooms, and tried to persuade him to go home, and not to “the training stables,” as he irreverently called Banford; but Charles had laughed and laughed, and joked, and given indirect answers, and Marston saw that he was determined, and discontinued pressing him.
The next afternoon Lord Welter and Charles rode up to the door at Ranford. The servants looked surprised; they were not expected. His lordship was out shooting; her ladyship was in the poultry-yard; Mr. Pool was in the billiard-room with Lord Saltire.
“The deuce!” said Lord Welter; “that’s lucky. I’ll get him to break it to the governor.”
The venerable nobleman was very much amused by the misfortunes of these ingenuous youths, and undertook the commission with great good nature. But, when he heard the cause of the mishap, he altered his tone considerably, and took on himself to give the young men what was for him a severe lecture. He was sorry this had come out of a drunken riot; he wished it ——— which, though bad enough, did not carry the disgrace with it that the other did. Let them take the advice of an old fellow who had lived in the world, ay, and moved with the world, for above eighty years, and take care not to be marked, even among their own set, as drinking men. In his day, he allowed, drinking was entirely de rigueur; and indeed nothing could be more proper and correct than the whole tiling they had just described to him, if it had happened fifty years ago. But now a drunken row was an anachronism. Nobody drank now. He had made a point of watching the best young fellows, and none of them drank. He made; a point of taking the time from the rising young fellows, as every one ought to, who wished to go with the world. In his day, for instance, it was the custom to talk with considerable freedom on sacred subjects, and he himself had been somewhat notorious for that sort of thing; but look at him now: he conformed with the times, and went to church. Every one went to church now. Let him call their attention to the fact that a great improvement had taken place in public morals of late years.
So the good-natured old heathen gave them what, I daresay, he thought was the best of advice. He is gone now to see what his system of morality is worth. I am very shy of judging him, or the men of his time. It gives me great pain to hear the men of the revolutionary era spoken of flippantly. The time was so exceptional. The men of that time were a race of giants. One wonders how the world got through that time at all. Six hundred millions of treasure spent by Britain alone! How mam millions of lives lost none may guess. What wonder if there were hellfire clubs and all kinds of monstrosities. Would any of the present generation have attended the fete of the goddess of reason, if they had lived at that time, I wonder? Of course they wouldn’t.
Charles went alone to the poultry-yard; but no one was there except the head keeper, who was administering medicine to a cock, whose appearance was indictable — that is to say, if the laws against cock-fighting were enforced. Lady Ascot had gone in; so Charles went in too, and went upstairs to his aunt’s room.
One of the old lady’s last fancies was sitting in the dark, or in a gloom so profound as to approach to darkness. So Charles, passing out of a light corridor, and shutting the door behind him, found himself unable to see his hand before him. Confident, however, of his knowledge of localities, he advanced with such success that he immediately fell crashing headlong over an ottoman; and in his descent, imagining that he was falling into a pit or gulf of unknown depth, uttered a wild cry of alarm. Whereupon the voice of Lady Ascot from close by answered, “Come in,” as if she thought she’d heard somebody knock.
“Come up, would be more appropriate, aunt,” said Charles. “Why do you sit in the dark? I’ve killed myself, I believe.”
“Is that you, Charles?” said she. “What brings you over? My dear, I am delighted. Open a bit of the window, Charles, and let me see you.”
Charles did as he was desired; and, as the strong light from without fell upon him, the old lady gave a deep sigh.
“Ah, dear, so like poor dear Petre about the eyes. There never was a handsome Ravenshoe since him, and here never will be another. You were quite tolerable as a boy, my dear; but you’ve got very coarse, very coarse and plain indeed. Poor Petre!”
“You’re more unlucky in the light than you were in the darkness, Charles,” said a brisk, clear, well-modulated voice from behind the old lady. “Grandma seems in one of her knock-me-down moods today. She had just told me that I was an insignificant chit, when you made your graceful and noiseless entrance, and saved me anything further.”
If Adelaide had been looking at Charles when she spoke, instead of at her work, she would have seen the start which he gave when he heard her voice. As it was, she saw nothing of it; and Charles, instantly recovering himself, said in the most nonchalant voice possible:
“Hallo, are you here? How do you contrive to work in the dark?”
“It is not dark to any one with eyes,” was the curt reply. “I can see to read.”
Here Lady Ascot said that, if she had called Adelaide a chit, it was because she had set up her opinion against that of such a man as Dr. Going; that Adelaide was a good and dutiful girl to her; that she was a very old woman, and perhaps shouldn’t live to see the finish of next year; and that her opinion still was that Charles was very plain and coarse, and she was sorry she couldn’t alter it.
Adelaide came rapidly up and kissed her, and then went and stood in the light beside Charles.
She had grown into a superb blonde beauty. From her rich brown crepe hair to her exquisite little foot, she was a model of grace. The nose was delicately aquiline, and the mouth receded slightly, while the chin was as slightly prominent; the eyes were brilliant, and were concentrated on their object in a moment; and the eyebrows surmounted them in a delicately but distinctly marked curve. A beauty she was, such as one seldom sees; and Charles, looking on her, felt that he loved her more madly than ever, and that he would die sooner than let her know it.
“Well, Charles,” she said, “you don’t seem overjoyed to see me.”
“A man can’t look joyous with broken shins, my dear Adelaide. Aunt, I’ve got some bad news for you. I am in trouble.”
“Oh dear,” said the old lady, “and what is the matter now? Something about a woman, I suppose. You Ravenshoes are always — ”
“No, no, aunt, Nothing of the kind. Adelaide, don’t go, pray; you will lose such a capital laugh. I’ve got rusticated, aunt.”
“That is very comical, I dare say,” said Adelaide, in a low voice; “but I don’t see the joke.”
“I thought you would have had a laugh at me, perhaps,” said Charles; “it is rather a favourite amusement of yours.”
“What, in the name of goodness, makes you so disagreeable and cross, today. Charles? You were never so before, when anything happened. I am sure I am very sorry for your misfortune, though I really don’t know its extent. Is it a very serious thing?”
“Serious, very. I don’t much like going home. Welter is in the same scrape; who is to tell her?”
“This is the way,” said Adelaide, “I’ll show you how to manage her.”
All this was carried on in a low tone, and very rapidly. The old lady had just begun in a loud, querulous, scolding voice to Charles, when Adelaide interrupted her with —
“I say, grandma, Welter is rusticated too.”
Adelaide good-naturedly said this to lead the old lady’s wrath from Charles, and throw it partly on to her grandson; but, however good her intentions, the execution of them was unsuccessful. The old lady fell to scolding Charles; accusing him of being the cause of the whole mishap, of leading Welter into every mischief, and stating her opinion that he was an innocent and exemplary youth, with the fault only of being too easily led away. Charles escaped as soon as he could, and was followed by Adelaide.
“This is not true, is it?” she said. “It is not your fault?”
“My fault, partly, of course. But Welter would have been sent down before, if it hadn’t been for me. He got me into the scrape this time. He mustn’t go back there. You must’n’t let him go back.”
“I let him go back, forsooth! What on earth can I ave to do with his lordship’s movements?” she said bitterly. “Do you know who you are talking to? — a beggarly orphan.”
“Hush: don’t talk like that, Adelaide. Your power in this house is very great. The power of the only sound head in the house. You could stop anything you liked from happening.”
They had come together at a conservatory door; and she put her back against it, and held up her hand to bespeak his attention more particularly.
“I wish it was true, Charles; but it isn’t. No one has any power over Lord Ascot. Is Welter much in debt?”
“I should say, a great deal,” was Charles’s reply. “I think I ought to tell you. You may help him to break it to them.”
“Ay, he always comes to me for that sort of thing. Always did from a child. I’ll tell you what, Charles, there’s trouble coming or come on this house. Lord Ascot came home from Chester looking like death; they say he lost fearfully both there and at Newmarket. He came home quite late, and went up to grandma; and there was a dreadful scene. She hasn’t been herself since. Another blow like it will kill her. I suspect my lord’s bare existence depends on this colt winning the Derby. Come and see it gallop,” she added, suddenly throwing her flashing eyes upon his, and speaking with an animation and rapidity very different from the cold stern voice in which she had been telling the amily troubles. u Come, and let us have some oxygen-I have not spoken to a man for a month. I have been leading a life like a nun’s; no, worse than any nun’s; for I have been bothered and humiliated by — ah! such wretched trivialities, Go and order horses. I will join you directly.”
So she dashed away and left him, and he hurried to the yard. Scarcely were the horses ready when she was back again, with the same stern, cold expression on her face, now more marked, perhaps, from the effect of the masculine habit she wore. She was a consummate horsewoman, and rode the furious black Irish mare, which was brought out for her, with ease and self-possession, seeming to enjoy the rearing and plunging of the sour-tempered brute far more than Charles, her companion, did, who would rather have seen her on a quieter horse.
A sweeping gallop under the noble old trees, through a deep valley, and past a herd of deer, which scudded away through the thick-strewn leaves, brought them to the great stables, a large building at the edge of the park, close to the downs. Twenty or thirty long-legged elegant, nonchalant-looking animals, covered to the tips of their ears with cloths, and ridden each by a queer-looking brown-faced lad, were in the act of returning from their afternoon exercise. These Adelaide’s mare, “Molly Asthore,” charged and dispersed like a flock of sheep; and then, Adelaide pointing with her whip to the downs, hurried past the stables towards a group they saw a little distance off.
There were only four people — Lord Ascot, the stud groom, and two lads. Adelaide was correctly informed; they were going to gallop the Voltigeur colt (since called Haphazard), and the cloths were now coming off him. Lord Ascot and the stud groom mounted their horses, and joined our pair, who were riding slowly along the measured mile the way the horse was to come.
Lord Ascot looked very pale and worn; he gave Charles a kindly greeting, and made a joke with Adelaide; but his hands fidgeted with his reins, and he kept turning back towards the horse they had left, wondering impatiently what was keeping the boy. At last-they saw the beautiful beast shake his ‘head, give two or three playful plunges, and then come striding rapidly towards them, over the short, springy turf.
Then they turned, and rode full speed: soon they heard the mighty hollow-sounding hoofs behind, that came rapidly towards them, devouring space. Then the colt rushed by them in his pride, with his chin on his chest, hard held, and his hind feet coming forward under his girth every stride, and casting the turf behind him in showers. Then Adelaide’s horse, after a few mad plunges, bolted, overtook the colt, and actually raced him for a few hundred yards; then the colt was pulled up on a breezy hill, and they all stood a little together talking and congratulating one another on the beauty of the horse.
Charles and Adelaide rode away together over the downs, intending to make a little detour, and so lengthen heir ride. They had had no chance of conversation since they parted at the conservatory door, and they took it np nearly where they had left it. Adelaide began, and, I may say. vent on, too, as she had most of the talking.
“I should like to be a duchess; then I should be mistress of the only thing I am afraid of.”
“What is that?”
“Poverty,” said she; “that is my only terror, and that is my inevitable fate.”
“I should have thought, Adelaide, that you were too high-spirited to care for that, or anything.”
“Ah, you don’t know; all my relations are poor. I know what it is; I know what it would be for a beauty like me.”
“You will never be poor or friendless while Lady Ascot lives.”
“How long will that be? My home now depends very much on that horse,; oh, if I were only a man, I would welcome poverty; it would force me to action.”
Charles blushed. Not many days before, Marston and he had had a battle royal, in which the former had said, that the only hope for Charles was that he should go two or three times without his dinner, and be made to earn it, and that as long as he had a “mag ” to bless himself with, he would always be a lazy, useless humbug; and now here was a young lady uttering the same atrocious sentiments. He called attention to the prospect.
Three hundred feet below them, Father Thames was inding along under the downs and yellow woodlands, past chalk quarry and grey farmhouse, blood-red beneath the setting sun; a soft, rich, autumnal haze was over everything; the smoke from the distant village hung like a curtain of pearl across the valley; and the long, straight, dark wood that crowned the high grey wold, was bathed in a dim purple mist, on its darkest side; and to perfect the air of dreamy stillness, some distant bells sent their golden sound floating on the peaceful air. It was a quiet day in the old age of the year; and its peace seemed to make itself felt on these two wild young birds; for they were silent more than half the way home; and then Charles said, in a low voice —
“Dear Adelaide, I hope you have chosen aright. The time will come when you will have to make a more important decision than any you have made yet. At one time in a man’s or woman’s life, they say, there is a choice between good and evil. In God’s name, think before you make it.”
“Charles,” she said, in a low and disturbed voice, “if a conjuror were to offer to show you your face in a glass, as it would be ten years hence, should you have courage to look?”
“1 suppose so; would not you?”
“Oh, no, no, no! How do you know what horrid thing would look at you, and scare you to death? Ten years hence; where shall we be then?”