"You see what you have done; you have cut me off from my own," he said terribly to the squire; but tried immediately to soothe the urchin with nursery talk and the pats on the shoulder which encourage a little boy to grow fast and tall. "Four years of separation," he resumed, "and my son taught to think that he has no father. By heavens! it is infamous, it is a curst piece of inhumanity. Mr. Beltham, if I do not see my wife, I carry off my son."
"You may ask till you"re hoa.r.s.e, you shall never see her in this house while I am here to command," said the squire.
"Very well; then Harry Richmond changes homes. I take him. The affair is concluded."
"You take him from his mother?" the squire sang out.
"You swear to me she has lost her wits; she cannot suffer. I can.
I shall not expect from you, Mr. Beltham, the minutest particle of comprehension of a father"s feelings. You are earthy; you are an animal."
The squire saw that he was about to lift the boy, and said, "Stop, never mind that. Stop, look at the case. You can call again to-morrow, and you can see me and talk it over."
"Shall I see my wife?"
"No, you shan"t."
"You remain faithful to your word, sir, do you?"
"I do."
"Then I do similarly."
"What! Stop! Not to take a child like that out of a comfortable house at night in Winter, man?"
"Oh, the night is temperate and warm; he shall not remain in a house where his father is dishonoured."
"Stop! not a bit of it," cried the squire. "No one speaks of you. I give you my word, you "re never mentioned by man, woman or child in the house."
"Silence concerning a father insinuates dishonour, Mr. Beltham."
"d.a.m.n your fine speeches, and keep your blackguardly hands off that boy," the squire thundered. "Mind, if you take him, he goes for good. He doesn"t get a penny from me if you have the bringing of him up. You"ve done for him, if you decide that way. He may stand here a beggar in a stolen coat like you, and I won"t own him. Here, Harry, come to me; come to your grandad."
Mr. Richmond caught the boy just when he was turning to run.
"That gentleman," he said, pointing to the squire, "is your grandpapa. I am your papa. You must learn at any cost to know and love your papa. If I call for you to-morrow or next day they will have played tricks with Harry Richmond, and hid him. Mr. Beltham, I request you, for the final time, to accord me your promise observe, I accept your promise--that I shall, at my demand, to-morrow or the next day, obtain an interview with my wife."
The squire coughed out an emphatic "Never!" and fortified it with an oath as he repeated it upon a fuller breath.
"Sir, I will condescend to entreat you to grant this permission," said Mr. Richmond, urgently.
"No, never: I won"t!" rejoined the squire, red in the face from a fit of angry coughing. "I won"t; but stop, put down that boy; listen to me, you Richmond! I"ll tell you what I"ll do. I "ll--if you swear on a Bible, like a cadger before a bench of magistrates, you"ll never show your face within a circuit o" ten miles hereabouts, and won"t trouble the boy if you meet him, or my daughter or me, or any one of us-hark ye, I"ll do this: let go the boy, and I"ll give ye five hundred--I"ll give ye a cheque on my banker for a thousand pounds; and, hark me out, you do this, you swear, as I said, on the servants" Bible, in the presence of my butler and me, "Strike you dead as Ananias and t" other one if you don"t keep to it," do that now, here, on the spot, and I"ll engage to see you paid fifty pounds a year into the bargain. Stop! and I"ll pay your debts under two or three hundred. For G.o.d"s sake, let go the boy!
You shall have fifty guineas on account this minute. Let go the boy! And your son--there, I call him your son--your son, Harry Richmond, shall inherit from me; he shall have Riversley and the best part of my property, if not every bit of it. Is it a bargain? Will you swear?
Don"t, and the boy"s a beggar, he"s a stranger here as much as you. Take him, and by the Lord, you ruin him. There now, never mind, stay, down with him. He"s got a cold already; ought to be in his bed; let the boy down!"
"You offer me money," Mr. Richmond answered.
"That is one of the indignities belonging to a connection with a man like you. You would have me sell my son. To see my afflicted wife I would forfeit my heart"s yearnings for my son; your money, sir, I toss to the winds; and I am under the necessity of informing you that I despise and loathe you. I shrink from the thought of exposing my son to your besotted selfish example. The boy is mine; I have him, and he shall traverse the wilderness with me. By heaven! his destiny is brilliant. He shall be hailed for what he is, the rightful claimant of a place among the proudest in the land; and mark me, Mr. Beltham, obstinate sensual old man that you are! I take the boy, and I consecrate my life to the duty of establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if you live and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig"s head to the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,--a common country squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we have mixed ours--and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on him--when you in your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry Richmond."
The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to utter. He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy about to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust a delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips. Then, after some moments of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly and gazed down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his eyes along the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee and swaddled the boy in the folds of the shawl. Raising him in a business-like way, he settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across gravel-walk and lawn, like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the whip has been applied.
The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and there a light-blue s.p.a.ce of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze smelt fresh of roots and heath. It was more a May-night than one of February.
So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch and fir-tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy"s terrors were overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before been out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs were not loud. On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began, he heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman"s voice that he knew to be his aunt Dorothy"s. It came after him only once: "Harry Richmond"; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park, among the hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward London. Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high and nodded a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one another; and his perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy sugarplums, notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to prognosticate hopefully of his future wisdom. So, when obedient to command he had given his father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder, ceasing to know that he was a wandering infant: and, if I remember rightly, he dreamed he was in a ship of cinnamon-wood upon a sea that rolled mighty, but smooth immense broad waves, and tore thing from thing without a sound or a hurt.
CHAPTER II. AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT
That night stands up without any clear traces about it or near it, like the brazen castle of romance round which the sea-tide flows. My father must have borne me miles along the road; he must have procured food for me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead and drinking new milk, and by-and-by hearing a roar of voices or vehicles, and seeing a dog that went alone through crowded streets without a master, doing as he pleased, and stopping every other dog he met. He took his turning, and my father and I took ours. We were in a house that, to my senses, had the smell of dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors were painted black, and shut with a bang. Italian organ-men and milk-men paraded the street regularly, and made it sound hollow to their music.
Milk, and no cows anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances among them; my thoughts were occupied by the singularity of such things.
My father could soon make me forget that I was transplanted; he could act dog, tame rabbit, fox, pony, and a whole nursery collection alive, but he was sometimes absent for days, and I was not of a temper to be on friendly terms with those who were unable to captivate my imagination as he had done. When he was at home I rode him all round the room and upstairs to bed, I lashed him with a whip till he frightened me, so real was his barking; if I said "Menagerie" he became a caravan of wild beasts; I undid a b.u.t.ton of his waistcoat, and it was a lion that made a spring, roaring at me; I pulled his coat-tails and off I went tugging at an old bear that swung a hind leg as he turned, in the queerest way, and then sat up and beating his breast sent out a mew-moan. Our room was richer to me than all the Grange while these performances were going forward. His monkey was almost as wonderful as his bear, only he was too big for it, and was obliged to aim at reality in his representation of this animal by means of a number of breakages; a defect that brought our landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my father"s companionship caused me to suffer proportionately in his absence. During that period of solitude, my nursemaid had to order me to play, and I would stumble about and squat in the middle of the floor, struck suddenly by the marvel of the difference between my present and my other home. My father entered into arrangements with a Punch and Judy man for him to pay me regular morning visits opposite our window; yet here again his genius defeated his kind intentions; for happening once to stand by my side during the progress of the show, he made it so vivid to me by what he said and did, that I saw no fun in it without him: I used to dread the heralding crow of Punch if he was away, and cared no longer for wooden heads being knocked ever so hard.
On Sundays we walked to the cathedral, and this was a day with a delight of its own for me. He was never away on the Sunday. Both of us attired in our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my father led me before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of British victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention. I understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and dropped his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce Nelson"s name or some other great man"s and this recurred regularly.
"What are we for now?" he would ask me as we left our house. I had to decide whether we took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do with capricious resolution. We were one Sunday for Shakespeare; another for Nelson or Pitt. "Nelson, papa," was my most frequent rejoinder, and he never dissented, but turned his steps toward Nelson"s cathedral dome, and uncovered his head there, and said: "Nelson, then, to-day"; and we went straight to his monument to perform the act of homage. I chose Nelson in preference to the others because near bed-time in the evening my father told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor Shakespeare lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on the ice to make himself interesting. I named them occasionally out of compa.s.sion, and to please my father, who said that they ought to have a turn. They were, he told me, in the habit of paying him a visit, whenever I had particularly neglected them, to learn the grounds for my disregard of their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me, and imparted many of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them a chance on the following Sunday.
"Great Will," my father called Shakespeare, and "Slender Billy," Pitt.
The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over the park after it by the light of Bardolph"s nose, upon which they put an extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but everybody in the park called him, "Father William"; and when he wanted to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase; Hamlet (the fact was impressed on me) offered him a three-legged stool; and a number of kings and knights and ladies lit their torches from Bardolph; and away they flew, distracting the keepers and leaving Will and his troop to the deer. That poor thing died from a different weapon at each recital, though always with a flow of blood and a successful dash of his antlers into Falstaff; and to hear Falstaff bellow! But it was mournful to hear how sorry Great Will was over the animal he had slain. He spoke like music. I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by Bardolph"s nose.
When I was just bursting out crying--for the deer"s tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at his side; he had little ones at home--Great Will remembered his engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he said the Jew would not see the difference: Falstaff only got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick.
My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air, and such liveliness--he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King Lear tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of Falstaff--that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them, which was better than understanding them. I required some help from him to see that Hamlet"s offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment of the chase, was laughable. He taught me what to think of it by pitching Great Will"s voice high, and Hamlet"s very low. By degrees I got some unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.
There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under eight or ten years old. He could guess on Sat.u.r.day whether I should name William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, "Slender Billy,"
as I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me solemnly, the ill.u.s.trious Minister had in his day a pa.s.sion. If I named him, my father would say, "W. P., otherwise S. B., was born in the year so-and-so; now," and he went to the cupboard, "in the name of Politics, take this and meditate upon him." The shops being all shut on Sunday, he certainly bought it, antic.i.p.ating me unerringly, on the Sat.u.r.day, and, as soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his repeating a couplet,
"Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry jam, When he heard they had taken Seringapatam."
At any rate, the rumour of his having done so, at periods of strong excitement, led to the inexplicable display of foresight on my father"s part.
My meditations upon Pitt were, under this influence, favourable to the post of a Prime Minister, but it was merely appet.i.te that induced me to choose him; I never could imagine a grandeur in his office, notwithstanding my father"s eloquent talk of ruling a realm, shepherding a people, hurling British thunderbolts. The day"s discipline was, that its selected hero should reign the undisputed monarch of it, so when I was for Pitt, I had my tart as he used to have it, and no story, for he had none, and I think my idea of the ruler of a realm presented him to me as a sort of shadow about a pastrycook"s shop. But I surprised people by speaking of him. I made remarks to our landlady which caused her to throw up her hands and exclaim that I was astonishing. She would always add a mysterious word or two in the hearing of my nursemaid or any friend of hers who looked into my room to see me. After my father had got me forward with instructions on the piano, and exercises in early English history and the book of the Peerage, I became the wonder of the house. I was put up on a stool to play "In my Cottage near a Wood," or "Cherry Ripe," and then, to show the range of my accomplishments, I was asked, "And who married the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Dewlap?" and I answered, "John Gregg Wetherall, Esquire, and disgraced the family." Then they asked me how I accounted for her behaviour.
"It was because the Duke married a dairymaid," I replied, always tossing up my chin at that. My father had concocted the questions and prepared me for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon his visitors and the landlady"s. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to her invariable whisper on these occasions. "Blood Rile," she said; and her friends all said "No!" like the run of a finger down a fiddlestring.
A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him out for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this gentleman entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and knees, and abused him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he introduced him to me as Shylock"s great-great-great-grandson, and said that Shylock was satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two hundred pounds, or else all his body: and this, he said, came of the emigration of the family from Venice to England. My father only seemed angry, for he went off with Shylock"s very great grandson arm-in-arm, exclaiming, "To the Rialto!" When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor, she said, "Oh, dear! oh, dear! then I"m afraid your sweet papa won"t return very soon, my pretty pet." We waited a number of days, until Mrs.
Waddy received a letter from him. She came full-dressed into my room, requesting me to give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on while she arranged her blue bonnet at the gla.s.s. The bonnet would not fix in its place. At last she sank down crying in a chair, and was all brown silk, and said that how to appear before a parcel of dreadful men, and perhaps a live duke into the bargain, was more than she knew, and more than could be expected of a lone widow woman. "Not for worlds!" she answered my pet.i.tion to accompany her. She would not, she said, have me go to my papa there for anything on earth; my papa would perish at the sight of me; I was not even to wish to go. And then she exclaimed, "Oh, the blessed child"s poor papa!" and that people were cruel to him, and would never take into account his lovely temper, and that everybody was his enemy, when he ought to be sitting with the highest in the land. I had realized the extremity of my forlorn state on a Sunday that pa.s.sed empty of my father, which felt like his having gone for ever. My nursemaid came in to a.s.sist in settling Mrs. Waddy"s bonnet above the six crisp curls, and while they were about it I sat quiet, plucking now and then at the brown silk, partly to beg to go with it, partly in jealousy and love at the thought of its seeing him from whom I was so awfully separated. Mrs. Waddy took fresh kisses off my lips, a.s.suring me that my father would have them in twenty minutes, and I was to sit and count the time. My nursemaid let her out. I pretended to be absorbed in counting, till I saw Mrs. Waddy pa.s.s by the window. My heart gave a leap of pain. I found the street-door open and no one in the pa.s.sage, and I ran out, thinking that Mrs. Waddy would be obliged to take me if she discovered me by her side in the street.
I was by no means disconcerted at not seeing her immediately. Running on from one street to another, I took the turnings with unhesitating boldness, as if I had a destination in view. I must have been out near an hour before I understood that Mrs. Waddy had eluded me; so I resolved to enjoy the shop-windows with the luxurious freedom of one whose speculations on those glorious things all up for show are no longer distracted by the run of time and a nursemaid. Little more than a glance was enough, now that I knew I could stay as long as I liked. If I stopped at all, it was rather to exhibit the bravado of liberty than to distinguish any particular shop with my preference: all were equally beautiful; so were the carriages; so were the people. Ladies frequently turned to look at me, perhaps because I had no covering on my head; but they did not interest me in the least. I should have been willing to ask them or any one where the Peerage lived, only my mind was quite full, and I did not care. I felt sure that a great deal of walking would ultimately bring me to St. Paul"s or Westminster Abbey; to anything else I was indifferent.
Toward sunset my frame was struck as with an arrow by the sensations of hunger on pa.s.sing a cook"s-shop. I faltered along, hoping to reach a second one, without knowing why I had dragged my limbs from the first.
There was a boy in ragged breeches, no taller than myself, standing tiptoe by the window of a very large and brilliant pastry-cook"s.
He persuaded me to go into the shop and ask for a cake. I thought it perfectly natural to do so, being hungry; but when I reached the counter and felt the size of the shop, I was abashed, and had to repeat the nature of my pet.i.tion twice to the young woman presiding there.
"Give you a cake, little boy?" she said. "We don"t give cakes, we sell them."
"Because I am hungry," said I, pursuing my request.
Another young woman came, laughing and shaking lots of ringlets.