The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Complete

I said again, ‘I will do what I can,’ and sang out for Temple.

He was alone. My father had slipped from him to leave a card at the squire’s hotel. General Goodwin touched Temple on the shoulder kindly, in marked contrast to his treatment of me, and wished us good-night. Nothing had been heard of my father by Janet, but while I was sitting with her, at a late hour, his card was brought up, and a pencilled entreaty for an interview the next morning.

‘That will suit grandada,’ Janet said. ‘He commissioned me before going to bed to write the same for him.’

She related that the prince was in a state of undisguised distraction. From what I could comprehend—it appeared incredible—he regarded his daughter’s marriage as the solution of the difficulty, the sole way out of the meshes.

‘Is not that her wish?’ said Temple; perhaps with a wish of his own.

‘Oh, if you think a lady like the Princess Ottilia is led by her wishes,’ said Janet. Her radiant perception of an ideal in her sex (the first she ever had) made her utterly contemptuous toward the less enlightened.

We appointed the next morning at half-past eleven for my father’s visit.

‘Not a minute later,’ Janet said in my ear, urgently. ‘Don’t—don’t let him move out of your sight, Harry! The princess is convinced you are not to blame.’

I asked her whether she had any knowledge of the squire’s designs.

‘I have not, on my honour,’ she answered. ‘But I hope… It is so miserable to think of this disgraceful thing! She is too firm to give way. She does not blame you. I am sure I do not; only, Harry, one always feels that if one were in another’s place, in a case like this, I could and would command him. I would have him obey me. One is not born to accept disgrace even from a father. I should say, “You shall not stir, if you mean to act dishonourably.” One is justified, I am sure, in breaking a tie of relationship that involves you in dishonour. Grandada has not spoken a word to me on the subject. I catch at straws. This thing burns me! Oh, good-night, Harry. I can’t sleep.’

‘Good-night,’ she called softly to Temple on the stairs below. I heard the poor fellow murmuring good-night to himself in the street, and thought him happier than I. He slept at a room close to the hotel.

A note from Clara Goodwin adjured me, by her memory of the sweet, brave, gracious fellow she loved in other days, to be worthy of what I had been. The General had unnerved her reliance on me.

I sat up for my father until long past midnight. When he came his appearance reminded me of the time of his altercation with Baroness Turckems under the light of the blazing curtains: he had supped and drunk deeply, and he very soon proclaimed that I should find him invincible, which, as far as insensibility to the strongest appeals to him went, he was.

‘Deny you love her, deny she loves you, deny you are one—I knot you fast!’

He had again seen Prince Ernest; so he said, declaring that the Prince positively desired the marriage; would have it. ‘And I,’ he dramatized their relative situations, ‘consented.’

After my experience of that night, I forgive men who are unmoved by displays of humour. Commonly we think it should be irresistible. His description of the thin-skinned sensitive prince striving to run and dodge for shelter from him, like a fever-patient pursued by a North-easter, accompanied by dozens of quaint similes full of his mental laughter, made my loathing all the more acute. But I had not been an equal match for him previous to his taking wine; it was waste of breath and heart to contend with him. I folded my arms tight, sitting rigidly silent, and he dropped on the sofa luxuriously.

‘Bed, Richie!’ he waved to me. ‘You drink no wine, you cannot stand dissipation as I do. Bed, my dear boy! I am a God, sir, inaccessible to mortal ailments! Seriously, dear boy, I have never known an illness in my life. I have killed my hundreds of poor devils who were for imitating me. This I boast—I boast constitution. And I fear, Richie, you have none of my superhuman strength. Added to that, I know I am watched over. I ask—I have: I scheme the tricks are in my hand! It may be the doing of my mother in heaven; there is the fact for you to reflect on. “Stand not in my way, nor follow me too far,” would serve me for a motto admirably, and you can put it in Latin, Richie. Bed! You shall turn your scholarship to account as I do my genius in your interest. On my soul, that motto in Latin will requite me. Now to bed.’

‘No,’ said I. ‘You have got away from me once. I shall keep you in sight and hearing, if I have to lie at your door for it. You will go with me to London to-morrow. I shall treat you as a man I have to guard, and I shall not let you loose before I am quite sure of you.’

‘Loose!’ he exclaimed, throwing up an arm and a leg.

‘I mean, sir, that you shall be in my presence wherever you are, and I will take care you don’t go far and wide. It’s useless to pretend astonishment. I don’t argue and I don’t beseech any further: I just sit on guard, as I would over a powder-cask.’

My father raised himself on an elbow. ‘The explosion,’ he said, examining his watch, ‘occurred at about five minutes to eleven—we are advancing into the morning—last night. I received on your behalf the congratulations of friends Loftus, Alton, Segrave, and the rest, at that hour. So, my dear Richie, you are sitting on guard over the empty magazine.’

I listened with a throbbing forehead, and controlled the choking in my throat, to ask him whether he had touched the newspapers.

‘Ay, dear lad, I have sprung my mine in them,’ he replied.

‘You have sent word—?’

‘I have despatched a paragraph to the effect, that the prince and princess have arrived to ratify the nuptial preliminaries.’

‘You expect it to appear this day?’

‘Or else my name and influence are curiously at variance with the confidence I repose in them, Richie.’

‘Then I leave you to yourself,’ I said. ‘Prince Ernest knows he has to expect this statement in the papers?’

‘We trumped him with that identical court-card, Richie.’

‘Very well. To-morrow, after we have been to my grandfather, you and I part company for good, sir. It costs me too much.’

‘Dear old Richie,’ he laughed, gently. ‘And now to bye-bye! My blessing on you now and always.’

He shut his eyes.

CHAPTER LI. AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER’S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT

The morning was sultry with the first rising of the sun. I knew that Ottilia and Janet would be out. For myself, I dared not leave the house. I sat in my room, harried by the most penetrating snore which can ever have afflicted wakeful ears. It proclaimed so deep-seated a peacefulness in the bosom of the disturber, and was so arrogant, so ludicrous, and inaccessible to remonstrance, that it sounded like a renewal of our midnight altercation on the sleeper’s part. Prolonged now and then beyond all bounds, it ended in the crashing blare whereof utter wakefulness cannot imagine honest sleep to be capable, but a playful melody twirled back to the regular note. He was fast asleep on the sitting-room sofa, while I walked fretting and panting. To this twinship I seemed condemned. In my heart nevertheless there was a reserve of wonderment at his apparent astuteness and resolution, and my old love for him whispered disbelief in his having disgraced me. Perhaps it was wilful self-deception. It helped me to meet him with a better face.

We both avoided the subject of our difference for some time: he would evidently have done so altogether, and used his best and sweetest manner to divert me: but when I struck on it, asking him if he had indeed told me the truth last night, his features clouded as though with an effort of patience. To my consternation, he suddenly broke away, with his arms up, puffing and stammering, stamping his feet. He would have a truce—he insisted on a truce, I understood him to exclaim, and that I was like a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master. He raved of the gallant down-rightedness of the young bloods of his day, and how splendidly this one and that had compassed their ends by winning great ladies, lawfully, or otherwise. For several minutes he was in a state of frenzy, appealing to his pattern youths of a bygone generation, as to moral principles—stuttering, and of a dark red hue from the neck to the temples. I refrained from a scuffle of tongues. Nor did he excuse himself after he had cooled. His hand touched instinctively for his pulse, and, with a glance at the ceiling, he exclaimed, ‘Good Lord!’ and brought me to his side. ‘These wigwam houses check my circulation,’ said he. ‘Let us go out-let us breakfast on board.’

The open air restored him, and he told me that he had been merely oppressed by the architect of the inferior classes, whose ceiling sat on his head. My nerves, he remarked to me, were very exciteable. ‘You should take your wine, Richie,—you require it. Your dear mother had a low-toned nervous system.’ I was silent, and followed him, at once a captive and a keeper.

This day of slackened sails and a bright sleeping water kept the yachtsmen on land; there was a crowd to meet the morning boat. Foremost among those who stepped out of it was the yellow-haired Eckart, little suspecting what the sight of him signalled to me. I could scarcely greet him at all, for in him I perceived that my father had fully committed himself to his plot, and left me nothing to hope. Eckart said something of Prince Hermann. As we were walking off the pier, I saw Janet conversing with Prince Ernest, and the next minute Hermann himself was one of the group. I turned to Eckart for an explanation.

‘Didn’t I tell you he called at your house in London and travelled down with me this morning!’ said Eckart.

My father looked in the direction of the princes, but his face was for the moment no index. They bowed to Janet, and began talking hurriedly in the triangle of road between her hotel, the pier, and the way to the villas: passing on, and coming to a full halt, like men who are not reserving their minds. My father stept out toward them. He was met by Prince Ernest. Hermann turned his back.

It being the hour of the appointment, I delivered Eckart over to Temple’s safe-keeping, and went up to Janet. ‘Don’t be late, Harry,’ she said.

I asked her if she knew the object of the meeting appointed by my grandfather.

She answered impatiently, ‘Do get him away from the prince.’ And then: ‘I ought to tell you the princess is well, and so on—pardon me just now: Grandada is kept waiting, and I don’t like it.’

Her actual dislike was to see Prince Ernest in dialogue with my father, it seemed to me; and the manner of both, which was, one would have said, intimate, anything but the manner of adversaries. Prince Ernest appeared to affect a pleasant humour; he twice, after shaking my father’s hand, stepped back to him, as if to renew some impression. Their attitude declared them to be on the best of terms. Janet withdrew her attentive eyes from observing them, and threw a world of meaning into her abstracted gaze at me. My father’s advance put her to flight.

Yet she gave him the welcome of a high-bred young woman when he entered the drawing-room of my grandfather’s hotel-suite. She was alone, and she obliged herself to accept conversation graciously. He recommended her to try the German Baths for the squire’s gout, and evidently amused her with his specific probations for English persons designing to travel in company, that they should previously live together in a house with a collection of undisciplined chambermaids, a musical footman, and a mad cook: to learn to accommodate their tempers. ‘I would add a touch of earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party know one another’s edges before starting.’ This was too far a shot of nonsense for Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or stupidity, or trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding. ‘I, for my part,’ said he, ‘stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies himself a born and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and no dog with a turn for feeling himself pulled by the collar. And that reminds me you are amateur of dogs. Have you a Pomeranian boar-hound?’

‘No,’ said Janet; ‘I have never even seen one’

‘That high.’ My father raised his hand flat.

‘Bigger than our Newfoundlands!’

‘Without exaggeration, big as a pony. You will permit me to send you one, warranted to have passed his distemper, which can rarely be done for our human species, though here and there I venture to guarantee my man as well as my dog.’

Janet interposed her thanks, declining to take the dog, but he dwelt on the dog’s charms, his youth, stature, appearance, fitness, and grandeur, earnestly. I had to relieve her apprehensions by questioning where the dog was.

‘In Germany,’ he said.