The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete

‘I ‘ll tell you what; there ‘s no doubt about one thing,’ said Charley; ‘Janet’s right—some of those girls are tremendously deep: you’re about the cleverest fellow I’ve ever met in my life. I thought of working into the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for me without much damaging you;—perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the squire spoke of making me his heir—or words to that effect neatly conjugated—before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on Riversley—I ‘d betray my bosom friend. I’m regularly “hoist on my own petard,” as they say in the newspapers. I’m a curate and no mistake. You did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat boxing. I bear no malice when I’m floored neatly.’

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father’s society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet. At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus Temple’s father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley. Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared, was working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat down beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero. I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon prove himself the better scholar. ‘There’s my old Richie!’ said Temple, fondling me on the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me at once.

We roamed the neighbourhood talking old school-days over, visiting houses, hunting and dancing, declaring every day we would write for Heriot to join us, instead of which we wrote a valentine to Julia Rippenger, and despatched a companion one composed in a very different spirit to her father. Lady Ilchester did us the favour to draw a sea-monster, an Andromeda, and a Perseus in the shape of a flying British hussar, for Julia’s valentine. It seemed to us so successful that we scattered half-a-dozen over the neighbourhood, and rode round it on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day to see the effect of them, meeting the postman on the road. He gave me two for myself. One was transparently from Janet, a provoking counterstroke of mine to her; but when I opened the other my heart began beating. The standard of Great Britain was painted in colours at the top; down each side, encricled in laurels, were kings and queens of England with their sceptres, and in the middle I read the initials, A. F-G. R. R., embedded in blue forget-me-hots. I could not doubt it was from my father. Riding out in the open air as I received it, I could fancy in my hot joy that it had dropped out of heaven.

‘He’s alive; I shall have him with me; I shall have him with me soon!’ I cried to Temple. ‘Oh! why can’t I answer him? where is he? what address? Let’s ride to London. Don’t you understand, Temple? This letter’s from my father. He knows I’m here. I’ll find him, never mind what happens.’

‘Yes, but,’ said Temple, ‘if he knows where you are, and you don’t know where he is, there’s no good in your going off adventuring. If a fellow wants to be hit, the best thing he can do is to stop still.’

Struck by the perspicacity of his views, I turned homeward. Temple had been previously warned by me to avoid speaking of my father at Riversley; but I was now in such a boiling state of happiness, believing that my father would certainly appear as he had done at Dipwell farm, brilliant and cheerful, to bear me away to new scenes and his own dear society, that I tossed the valentine to my aunt across the breakfast-table, laughing and telling her to guess the name of the sender. My aunt flushed.

‘Miss Bannerbridge?’ she said.

A stranger was present. The squire introduced us.

‘My grandson, Harry Richmond, Captain William Bulsted, frigate Polyphemus; Captain Bulsted, Master Augustus Temple.’

For the sake of conversation, Temple asked him if his ship was fully manned.

‘All but a mate,’ said the captain.

I knew him by reputation as the brother of Squire Gregory Bulsted of Bulsted, notorious for his attachment to my aunt, and laughing-stock of the county.

‘So you’ve got a valentine,’ the captain addressed me. ‘I went on shore at Rio last year on this very day of the month, just as lively as you youngsters for one. Saltwater keeps a man’s youth in pickle. No valentine for me! Paid off my ship yesterday at Spithead, and here I am again on Valentine’s Day.’

Temple and I stared hard at a big man with a bronzed skin and a rubicund laugh who expected to receive valentines.

My aunt thrust the letter back to me secretly. ‘It must be from a lady,’ said she.

‘Why, who’d have a valentine from any but a lady?’ exclaimed the captain.

The squire winked at me to watch his guest. Captain Bulsted fed heartily; he was thoroughly a sailor-gentleman, between the old school and the new, and, as I perceived, as far gone in love with my aunt as his brother was. Presently Sewis entered carrying a foaming tankard of old ale, and he and the captain exchanged a word or two upon Jamaica.

‘Now, when you’ve finished that washy tea of yours, take a draught of our October, brewed here long before you were a lieutenant, captain,’ said the squire.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the captain replied; ‘I know that ale; a moment, and I will gladly. I wish to preserve my faculties; I don’t wish to have it supposed that I speak under fermenting influences. Sewis, hold by, if you please.’

My aunt made an effort to retire.

‘No, no, fair play; stay,’ said the squire, trying to frown, but twinkling; my aunt tried to smile, and sat as if on springs.

‘Miss Beltham,’ the captain bowed to her, and to each one as he spoke, ‘Squire Beltham, Mr. Harry Richmond; Mr. Temple; my ship was paid off yesterday, and till a captain’s ship is paid off, he ‘s not his own master, you are aware. If you think my behaviour calls for comment, reflect, I beseech you, on the nature of a sailor’s life. A three-years’ cruise in a cabin is pretty much equivalent to the same amount of time spent in a coffin, I can assure you; with the difference that you’re hard at work thinking all the time like the—hum.’

‘Ay, he thinks hard enough,’ the squire struck in.

‘Pardon me, sir; like the—hum—plumb-line on a leeshore, I meant to observe. This is now the third—the fourth occasion on which I have practised the observance of paying my first visit to Riversley to know my fate, that I might not have it on my conscience that I had missed a day, a minute, as soon as I was a free man on English terra firma. My brother Greg and I were brought up in close association with Riversley. One of the Beauties of Riversley we lost! One was left, and we both tried our luck with her; honourably, in turn, each of us, nothing underhand; above-board, on the quarter-deck, before all the company. I ‘ll say it of my brother, I can say it of myself. Greg’s chances, I need not remark, are superior to mine; he is always in port. If he wins, then I tell him—“God bless you, my boy; you’ve won the finest woman, the handsomest, and the best, in or out of Christendom!” But my chance is my property, though it may be value only one farthing coin of the realm, and there is always pity for poor sinners in the female bosom. Miss Beltham, I trespass on your kind attention. If I am to remain a bachelor and you a maiden lady, why, the will of heaven be done! If you marry another, never mind who the man, there’s my stock to the fruit of the union, never mind what the sex. But, if you will have one so unworthy of you as me, my hand and heart are at your feet, ma’am, as I have lost no time in coming to tell you.’ So Captain Bulsted concluded. Our eyes were directed on my aunt. The squire bade her to speak out, for she had his sanction to act according to her judgement and liking.

She said, with a gracefulness that gave me a little aching of pity for the poor captain: ‘I am deeply honoured by you, Captain Bulsted, but it is not my intention to marry.’

The captain stood up, and bowing humbly, replied ‘I am ever your servant, ma’am.’

My aunt quitted the room.

‘Now for the tankard, Sewis,’ said the captain.

Gradually the bottom of the great tankard turned up to the ceiling. He drank to the last drop in it.

The squire asked him whether he found consolation in that.

The captain sighed prodigiously and said: ‘It ‘s a commencement, sir.’

‘Egad, it’s a commencement ‘d be something like a final end to any dozen of our fellows round about here. I’ll tell you what: if stout stomachs gained the day in love-affairs, I suspect you’d run a good race against the male half of our county, William. And a damned good test of a man’s metal, I say it is! What are you going to do to-day?’

‘I am going to get drunk, sir.’

‘Well, you might do worse. Then, stop here, William, and give my old Port the preference. No tongue in the morning, I promise you, and pleasant dreams at night.’ The captain thanked him cordially, but declined, saying that he would rather make a beast of himself in another place.

The squire vainly pressed his hospitality by assuring him of perfect secresy on our part, as regarded my aunt, and offering him Sewis and one of the footmen to lift him to bed. ‘You are very good, squire,’ said the captain; ‘nothing but a sense of duty restrains me. I am bound to convey the information to my brother that the coast is clear for him.’

‘Well, then, fall light, and for’ard,’ said the squire, shaking him by the hand. Forty years ago a gentleman, a baronet, had fallen on the back of his head and never recovered.

‘Ay, ay, launch stern foremost, if you like!’ said the captain, nodding; ‘no, no, I don’t go into port pulled by the tail, my word for it, squire; and good day to you, sir.’

‘No ill will about this bothering love-business of yours, William?’

‘On my soul, sir, I cherish none.’

Temple and I followed him out of the house, fascinated by his manners and oddness. He invited us to jump into the chariot beside him. We were witnesses of the meeting between him and his brother, a little sniffling man, as like the captain as a withered nut is like a milky one.

‘Same luck, William?’ said Squire Gregory.

‘Not a point of change in the wind, Greg,’ said the captain.

They wrenched hands thereupon, like two carpet-shakers, with a report, and much in a similar attitude.

‘These young gentlemen will testify to you solemnly, Greg, that I took no unfair advantage,’ said the captain; ‘no whispering in passages, no appointments in gardens, no letters. I spoke out. Bravely, man! And now, Greg, referring to the state of your cellar, our young friends here mean to float with us to-night. It is now half-past eleven A.M. Your dinner-hour the same as usual, of course? Therefore at four P.M. the hour of execution. And come, Greg, you and I will visit the cellar. A dozen and half of light and half-a-dozen of the old family—that will be about the number of bottles to give me my quietus, and you yours—all of us! And you, young gentlemen, take your guns or your rods, and back and be dressed by the four bell, or you ‘ll not find the same man in Billy Bulsted.’

Temple was enraptured with him. He declared he had been thinking seriously for a long time of entering the Navy, and his admiration of the captain must have given him an intuition of his character, for he persuaded me to send to Riversley for our evening-dress clothes, appearing in which at the dinner-table, we received the captain’s compliments, as being gentlemen who knew how to attire ourselves to suit an occasion. The occasion, Squire Gregory said, happened to him too often for him to distinguish it by the cut of his coat.

‘I observe, nevertheless, Greg, that you have a black tie round your neck instead of a red one,’ said the captain.

‘Then it came there by accident,’ said Squire Gregory.

‘Accident! There’s no such thing as accident. If I wander out of the house with a half dozen or so in me, and topple into the brook, am I accidentally drowned? If a squall upsets my ship, is she an accidental residue of spars and timber and old iron? If a woman refuses me, is that an accident? There’s a cause for every disaster: too much cargo, want of foresight, want of pluck. Pooh! when I’m hauled prisoner into a foreign port in time of war, you may talk of accidents. Mr. Harry Richmond, Mr. Temple, I have the accidental happiness of drinking to your healths in a tumbler of hock wine. Nominative, hic, haec, hoc.’

Squire Gregory carried on the declension, not without pride. The Vocative confused him.