THE MODERN
STUDENT'S LIBRARY

EACH VOLUME EDITED BY A LEADING
AMERICAN AUTHORITY

This series is composed of such works as are conspicuous in the province of literature for their enduring influence. Every volume is recognized as essential to a liberal education and will tend to infuse a love for true literature and an appreciation of the qualities which cause it to endure.

A descriptive list of the volumes published in this series appears in the last pages of this volume

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY

THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL

THE ORDEAL

OF

RICHARD FEVEREL

A HISTORY OF A FATHER AND SON

BY

GEORGE MEREDITH

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

FRANK W. CHANDLER

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND DEAN OF THE
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON ATLANTA
SAN FRANCISCO DALLAS

Copyright, 1896, 1917, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

Among the Victorian novelists, George Meredith occupies a place apart. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, he appeals to a select few. Those who appreciate him are folk of his own temper—cultivated, intellectual, urbane. They are persons of taste and discernment. They are generally the middle-aged rather than the young. They are those who, aloof and contemplative, relish the comedy of life, rather than those who throw themselves whole-heartedly into the game. It is not to be marvelled at, therefore, that Meredith should have won his way slowly, or that recognition, when it came, should have rendered his position unique and secure.

Meredith's career as a writer of prose was opened, in 1856, with The Shaving of Shagpat, an experiment in fantastic Oriental romance. In the following year, he exploited German romance less successfully in Farina, a Legend of Cologne. Having thus trained his 'prentice hand, he passed to mastery of his craft in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, published in 1859. This was his first modern novel, and probably his best. It showed him, not only expert in the use of language and original in literary technic, but distinguished, also, as an observer of the world and an analyst of character. The psychological novel of George Eliot, just emerging, found here a rival even more subtle. Adam Bede, a twin-birth with Feverel, although detailed in its exploration of motive and feeling, demanded less mental effort on the part of its readers; it accordingly attracted much greater attention. Whereas it was often reprinted, no second edition of Feverel came from the press for nearly two decades.

In the meantime, Meredith had continued his course undeterred by lack of popular approval, writing six other novels before the appearance, in 1879, of The Egoist—most characteristic of all. Two novels in particular reflected his experience of Italy, gained while acting there as war correspondent in 1866. The first was Emilia in England (1864), later rechristened Sandra Belloni. The second was its sequel Vittoria (1867). The other works of the period comprise the semi-farcical Evan Harrington (1861); the serious Rhoda Fleming (1865); the clever Harry Richmond (1870-71); and Meredith's favorite—Beauchamp's Career (1874-75). It is The Egoist, however, that most completely illustrates its author's conception of the novel of types. In this work, with rare skill and comic élan, if with a persistency a little wearisome, he lays bare the secrets of a heart and intellect thoroughly self-centered, proceeding so obviously from the desire to make out a case that he is likely to displease those who value story, yet satisfying those who enjoy brilliant comment on character and a study of its intricacies.

In his later novels, Meredith never forgot the typical in attending to the particular, even though The Tragic Comedians (1880) reflected incidents in the life of the socialist leader Lassalle, and Diana of the Crossways (1885) certain traits of Sheridan's granddaughter, Mrs. Norton. One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895) bring to a close the catalogue of Meredith's fiction, except for the unfinished Celt and Saxon published after his death.

Of Meredith as a poet this is not the place to speak. Suffice it to say that he did his first writing in verse, issuing a volume when twenty-three, and several others later in life, the best known being his sequence of irregular sonnets entitled Modern Love (1867). His poetry, like his prose, is rich in content but difficult at times by reason of its crabbed and meticulous expression—a trait due to no obscurity of thought or lack of feeling, but rather to the desire to compress much meaning within a cryptic phrase. As a playwright, Meredith attempted comedy in The Sentimentalists, which was acted posthumously. As an essayist, he fathered a memorable discussion of the comic spirit and its uses, made concrete in his novels.

Meredith's life was comparatively uneventful. He was born in 1828 at Portsmouth, the son of a naval outfitter. Early left an orphan, he was educated in Germany, and, returning to England, studied law, experimented in journalism, and fell in with a group of intellectuals led by Frederic Harrison and John Morley. He became literary adviser to the publishers Chapman and Hall; he edited for a short period The Fortnightly Review, and served abroad as correspondent for The Morning Post. But most of his maturity was passed in rural retirement in Surrey. He was twice married, at first unhappily to a daughter of the novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, and then more fortunately to a Miss Vulliamy, who bore him two children. His fame grew very slowly. Not until the age of sixty was he recognized as among the chief English novelists. But at the time of his death, in 1909, he was admittedly the foremost man of letters in Great Britain.

II

Meredith is first and last an intellectualist. Hence his preference for the psychological novel, for the novel of types, for the novel that is half essay, for the novel of distinctive style. Hence, also, his conception of the importance for the novelist of comedy and the comic spirit. Comedy, according to Meredith, is embodied mind, and its function is to expose violations of rational law. It is common sense chastising with the laughter of reason aberrations from the sensible. Comedy measures individual shortcomings by the social norm. It results from "the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence." It is "a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing." Comedy is thus refined rather than Rabelaisian; it is impartial rather than sentimental. It relies upon creating ideal figures that epitomize mankind in certain follies. It is typical and general in character, whereas tragedy is concerned primarily with the individual.

"The comic spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech." On the stage, the great master of such comedy is Molière, and in the novel, we might add, Meredith. Meredith's confession of faith in the efficacy of the comic spirit is given in the prelude to The Egoist, and in these words of his famous Essay: "If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense, you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead.... It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips.... Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation.... Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown...; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit,... the Spirit overhead will look humanly malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit."

Unquestionably it is by the aid of this spirit that Meredith writes his novels, even including such a tragedy from the victim's point of view as Richard Feverel. For Meredith is theoretic or nothing. Conceiving of a folly to be displayed and made ridiculous, he invents persons and situations best to accomplish his purpose. He is, therefore, no mere realist examining the confused detail of actual life "by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal." He is rather an idealist, who holds it to be the business of art to render life in quintessence. The artist must both simplify and elaborate. First, he must simplify experience into typical deeds and persons, eliminating from his scheme the merely accidental and particular. Second, he must elaborate his simplification, presenting it through representative concrete instances that it may lose the aspect of an abstract formula and acquire emotional significance. Meredith is thus an intellectualist engaged in playing a game of literary chess. He has made the pattern on his board and designed the pieces, and he moves them according to a pre-arranged plan. Just as his Sir Austin seeks to enact the rôle of Providence in determining the career of Richard Feverel, so Meredith plays Providence to his personages, and, more than most novelists, he visibly controls their fate.

Since Meredith's folk are etherealized specimens of humanity set and kept in motion by their creator, it is his attitude toward them that interests us quite as much as their actions. Meredith's attitude is determined by his comic outlook upon life. Unswayed by the petty prejudices of his people, he surveys them with Olympian serenity, aware of a hundred impulses and errors in their conduct that will lead to conclusions undreamt of by themselves but clearly foreseen by the novelist and his readers. From a rarer atmosphere than that in which his people move, Meredith looks down upon their whimsies and their deeds with a smile of calm omniscience.

Moreover, he separates himself from them by a wall of clever comment, sometimes sparkling and ironical, sometimes soberly extended to the proportions of an essay. Indeed, his novels are sometimes one-third narrative and two-thirds essay, with the dissertational manner infecting the narrative parts incurably. No one, I suppose, would continue reading The Egoist merely from interest in its plot. To enjoy it one must relish inspecting at leisure the artificial attitudes of artificial people and listening, not merely to their smart chatter, but to the smarter discourse of the master of the puppets, who, while making them dance, lectures for the edification of the elect. Thus Meredith, having shown his hero touched by jealousy, lapses into a little essay on the theme. "Remember the poets upon Jealousy," he writes. "It is to be haunted in the heaven of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded, embraced, hugged by this infernal Third; it is love's bed of burning marl; to see and taste the withering Third in the bosom of sweetness; to be dragged through the past and find the fair Eden of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and glory to behold them blood; to adore the bitter creature trebly and with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe; it is to be cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and supplicating, and consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and victoriously self-justified in revenge." Needless to say, generalizations of this sort, intruding upon the narrative at every turn, choke its progress and prove distracting.

Almost equally distracting is Meredith's predilection for resorting to the methods of comedy while writing fiction. As W. C. Brownell has put it; "The necessities of comedy, the irruption of new characters, their disappearance after they have done their turn, expectation balked by shifting situations, the frequent postponement of the dénouement when it particularly impends, and the alleviation of impatience by a succession of subordinate climaxes—all the machinery of the stage, in fact—impair the narrative."

III

But if the tricks of the essayist and the playwright are freely borrowed by Meredith, sometimes to his disadvantage and to ours, they are nevertheless in a measure appropriate to the kind of fiction he affects. For Meredith is a psychological novelist. He is bent upon displaying the inward process of the mind. As Richard Le Galliene has said of him: "The passion of his genius is ... the tracing of the elemental in the complex; the registration of the infinitesimal vibrations of first causes, the tracking in human life of the shadowiest trail of primal instinct, the hairbreadth measurement of subtle psychological tangents: and the embodiment of these results in artistic form." Meredith, in Richard Feverel, declares that for the novel "An audience will come to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work.... To them nothing will be trivial.... They will see the links of things as they pass, and wonder not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter came out of that small one." Certainly Meredith's efforts have tended to realize that time. But the psychology of his characters is general rather than individual. You are conscious that these minds are typical, or even symbolic. They belong to an imaginary and rational world treated as though it were real.

An incidental passage in Beauchamp's Career shows that Meredith has understood both his limitations and his peculiar ability. "My way," he writes, "is like a Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive, and difficult between the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real which delight mankind—honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none! they are actual yet uncommon. It is the clockwork of the brain that they are directed to set in motion, and—poor troop of actors to vacant benches!—the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them we are lost."

In Meredith's novels, which indeed reveal in operation "the clockwork of the brain," the author has taken care still further to intellectualize his appeal by means of his style. His technic holds attention; he is an artificer of style, and, as such, he writes a style of artifice. He seeks to express himself with novelty and distinction. If a boy runs, Meredith speaks of him as being seen to bound "and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft, clapping heels." If a woman runs, Meredith writes: "She was fleet; she ran as though a hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden pair multiply one another to speed her.... Suddenly her flight wound to an end in a dozen twittering steps, and she sank." If a heroine of eighteen would take leave of her admirer, she says: "We have met. It is more than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it be forever. Oh, terrible word! Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to us for our sole riches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures, and is the passport given by Abnegation unto Woe that prays to quit this probationary sphere."

Fancy any human being—least of all a girl—discoursing thus! But, no matter how simple a thought or action, Meredith sends it forth arrayed in finer gear than Solomon in all his glory. It is beribboned with metaphor and personification; it is beflounced with epigram and allegory. It is truth rendered more precious, as the medieval critics advised, by being wrapped in sayings not to be lightly understood by the vulgar. So, when a lover admires the chasteness of his lady, Meredith remarks: "He saw the Goddess Modesty guarding Purity; and one would be bold to say that he did not hear the precepts, Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal, cawing approval of her over their munching gums."

But Meredith's gift of phrase and his knack of knocking out epigrams, and his mastery over metaphor and lyrical description cannot be too highly commended. Diana is "wind-blown but ascending." When Redworth sees her kindling a fire, "a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows." After Sandra's singing, the stillness settled back again "like one folding up a precious jewel." A dull professor "pores over a little inexactitude in phrases and pecks at it like a domestic fowl." Of one who has ceased to love we hear that "the passion in her was like a place of waves evaporated to a crust of salt." Of a lady's letter we learn that it "flourished with light strokes all over, like a field of the bearded barley." Of a heroine we are told that: "She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed fearless of a sting; the lady patted them as her swans." There is brilliant illumination in such comparisons, a light shed instantaneously upon traits and mental experiences otherwise not to be revealed. When the Egoist would affectionately approach his shrinking Clara, nothing could better deliver the situation than Meredith's simile: "The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing under the curled ridge. She stooped to a buttercup; the monster swept by."

It is felicity in the use of rhetorical figure that enables Meredith to characterize the style of a Carlyle as, "resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencement running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints." It is Meredith's gift for phrase that enables him to paint those wonderful backgrounds for action which are the despair of common writers. Sometimes the scenes are sketched in with but a touch or two of suggestion. So, when Richard Feverel and Lucy spend an evening afloat, Meredith writes: "Hanging between two heavens on the lake: floating to her voice: the moon stepping over and through white shoals of soft high clouds above and below: floating to her voice—no other breath abroad! His soul went out of his body as he listened." Or, when Richard, in gay company, passes a night at Richmond, Meredith says simply: "Silver was seen far out on Thames. The wine ebbed, and the laughter. Sentiment and cigars took up the wondrous tale."

Sometimes the description is long and minute, but always it is beautifully fresh. Thus the coming of dawn is pictured in The Amazing Marriage: "The smell of rock-waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen; air became a wine that raised the breast high to drink it; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights.... The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted from brown to purple black.... The armies of the young sunrise in mountain-lands neighbouring the plains, vast shadows, were marching over woods and meads, black against the edge of golden; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and dark-banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the sweep of their rivers."

IV

Meredith's style receives its final and distinctive flavor, however, from the liberal dash of aphorism with which his books are sprinkled. Often an epigram will turn upon some metaphor. Such is the statement that: "A bone in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and worry corrects the vagrancies and promotes the healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or not," or the exclamation: "Who are not fools to be set spinning, if we choose to whip them with their vanity! It is the consolation of the great to watch them spin." Such, too, is the reflection that: "Most of the people one has at table are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one another, they call it conversation." More frequently, the epigram is a neat generalization left abstract, as for example: "Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered"; "Cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves"; "Fools run jabbering of the irony of fate to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes"; "Expediency is man's wisdom; doing right is God's"; "Women cannot repose on a man who is not positive; nor have they much gratification in confounding him"; "Convictions are generally first impressions sealed with later prejudices"; "The hero of two women must die and be wept over in common before they can appreciate one another."

A thousand such jewels glitter in the richly wrought tapestry of Meredith's style. That he painstakingly inserted them and wove this fabric to attract attention by its singularity and beauty, he cheerfully admits in a passage of Emilia in England. "The point to be considered," he there remarks, "is whether fiction demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a philosophical work should. When we ask for facts simply we feel the intrusion of style. Of fiction it is a part. In the one case the classical robe, in the other any medieval phantasy of clothing."

The difficulty with a style so artificial and intellectualized is obvious. Meredith, according to Brownell, "flatters one's cleverness at first, but in the end he fatigues it." The perpetual crackle of aphorism and metaphor surprises, gratifies, and then wearies; for a writer who will never say a plain thing plainly, not only keeps his readers under strain, but soon seems himself to be straining. Nowhere is this more evident than in Meredith's predilection for repeating a single happy phrase such as the epithet "rogue in porcelain" applied to a heroine. Since the phrase tickles his fancy, he plays with it, drops it, picks it up, mumbles it over and over as a dog might a bone, and through chapter after chapter is ready at any pretext to run round and round with it barking. Despite his assiduous striving for novelty, therefore, Meredith is often tedious, an effect induced, not merely by his style (whether repetitious or gasping after eccentricity), but also by his method. He is so intent upon weaving his commentary upon every speech and action that the occasion of the commentary is smothered. A phrase becomes the text of a sermon, a gesture the excuse for paragraphs of oblique reflection. Thus he forfeits the advantage of downright sincerity and of forthright progress, and teases interest out of all patience.

V

Since Meredith is an intellectualist, we naturally ask what may be his philosophy. Unlike Ibsen or Browning, he preaches no doctrine. He offers no explicit theory of life. Nor does he, like Dickens or Reade or Brieux, advocate any special reform. He is never a propagandist. Some have lamented this fact; more have seen in it an argument for his universality and permanence. Though he fight no battles for specific causes, his influence is arrayed in general against certain tendencies that he disapproves and would laugh to defeat. Egoism, sentimentalism, hypocrisy, are fair game for his comedy. As an intellectualist he dislikes and distrusts excess of emotion—feeling indulged for its own sake. "Sentimentalists," he declares, "are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."

Well might Mrs. Carlyle complain that Meredith's work lacked tears. That it does so he would be the first to admit, for he questions the worth of pathos for any true captain of his soul. "Pathos is a tide; often it carries the awakener of it off his feet," Meredith writes. "We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to the work of calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble jump away from the rock after that venerable lawgiver had knocked the water out of it." So Meredith sacrifices passion to analysis. His heroes and heroines rarely love so simply and so ardently as do Richard and Lucy; but the affection of even this delectable pair is modified in presentation by the playful cynicism of the narrator of their story. On the other hand, it is futile to cavil at Meredith or any other artist for lacking such qualities as are incompatible with those he most notably possesses. You cannot expect abandon of passion in the characters of a novelist whose forte is detachment and sublimated common sense. Your intellectualist is not to be blamed if he fails to write as a sentimentalist.

Meredith's positive philosophy has been formulated by Elmer J. Bailey in terms that may be briefly paraphrased: Meredith thinks of man as torn between Nature and Circumstance. By Nature is meant the world of instinct, of healthy normal impulse. By Circumstance is meant the world of artificial laws erected by society as the machinery for its conduct and control. Nature is spontaneous; Circumstance is traditional. Man may err by allowing to either undue dominance. His only safety lies in the use of his reason which will enable him to keep both Nature and Circumstance in proper equipoise. And the most serviceable instrument of reason for detecting the follies of convention or of feeling is the comic spirit. Without this spirit we are not truly intellectual, for, as Meredith has said: "Not to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind." Let us possess mind, he seems to urge, and through mind cultivate the soul. In The Tragic Comedians he remarks: "It is the soul which does things in life—the rest is vapor.... Action means life to the soul as to the body.... Compromise is virtual death; it is the pact between cowardice and comfort, under the title of expediency. So do we gather dead matter about us. So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt. The war with evil in every form must be incessant; we cannot have peace." The serious note here sounded may be heard again in his letter to a friend, Mrs. Gilman. There Meredith says: "I have written always with the perception that there is no life but of the spirit; that the concrete is the shadowy; yet that the way to spiritual life lies in the complete unfolding of the creature, not in the nipping of his passions. An outrage to nature helps to extinguish his light."

VI

Just such an outrage to nature perpetrated with the best intentions, but in blind folly, is the subject of Meredith's novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. A dogmatic and conventional father endeavors to determine his son's life according to an infallible system of parental dictation. Instead of allowing the boy to develop naturally from within, Sir Austin seeks to mould him absolutely from without. The failure of this experiment makes the story. The first eleven chapters are in a sense introductory. They present to the reader the members of the Feverel family and describe with gusto a poaching escapade of Richard's youth. From this first ordeal he emerges triumphant by obeying the impulse of his heart to make frank confession, despite his father's endeavor to patch up the matter by plotting. Then, in the next twenty chapters, follows the account of Richard's passion for the lovely Lucy and of the machinations of those who would nip it in the bud. All these checks are for the moment overcome when Richard, after having suffered separation from Lucy, is again thrown with her by chance and impulsively marries her.

In the chapters next ensuing Sir Austin, instead of gracefully accepting defeat, masks and crushes his emotions and permits his Mephistophelian nephew, the cynical Adrian, to scheme for Richard's alienation from his bride. Richard is lured away and succumbs to the spell of a wicked enchantress whom at first he has thought to reform; and then, shamed and distraught, he wanders abroad, seeking a purge for his sin. Meanwhile, the deserted wife, at Adrian's instigation, has been assailed by a villain, the husband of Richard's enchantress. Issuing unscathed from her ordeal, Lucy is tardily accepted by the complacent Sir Austin and received, with her child, at his house. Since Richard has at length achieved self-mastery and has resolved to return and confess to his wife, and plead for her grace, a general reconciliation seems imminent. But the novelist will not allow his tale to end happily lest its moral be frustrate. Accordingly, although Richard returns for an hour to be freely forgiven by Lucy, he dashes away forthwith, despite her entreaties, to duel with her persecutor. Joy, even yet, might emerge from disaster, since Richard escapes from the duel with only a wound, but the author continues implacable. His heroine, in nursing her husband, succumbs to a strain long protracted, and Richard, though recovered in body, is left but a wreck of his former self. Such is the desolating outcome of attempting to regulate healthy human loves by a worldly system.

What is tragic for hero and heroine is gravely comic to the eye of the intellectualist surveying the folly of men from a height far above the troubled waves of their passion. For Meredith, Sir Austin incarnates a comic error. His story is the comedy of one who theorizes at length upon life, but utterly fails to deal with it practically. Of course Sir Austin takes no blame to himself. It is useless, he reflects, "to base any system on a human being," even though this is precisely what he has done. And when Richard is to return to his wife, and Sir Austin has at last grown kind to her, we hear that: "He could now admit that instinct had so far beaten science; for, as Richard was coming, as all were to be happy, his wisdom embraced them all paternally as the author of their happiness." Of Sir Austin, Meredith remarks: "He had experimented on humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once, when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity's failings fell on the shoulders of his son." The reader's inevitable reaction to the novel is expressed by Lady Blandish: "Oh! how sick I am of theories and systems and the pretensions of men!... I shall hate the name of science till the day I die. Give me nothing but commonplace, unpretending people!"

That the plot of Richard Feverel unduly tantalizes goes without saying. The author keeps his hero and heroine apart by main force. Granting that Richard is the victim of rascals, as well as of a ridiculous system, his easy desertion of the wife whom he loves and his continued separation from her seem to lie in Meredith's will rather than in that of his hero. Richard's yielding to Mrs. Mount, described with remarkable power, is more natural, but his mooning about Germany while Lucy is left to struggle alone is as exasperating as her failure to apprise him of the fact that she is to bear him a child. Splendid as is the last meeting of Richard and Lucy, declared by Stevenson to be "the strongest scene since Shakespeare in the English tongue," it forfeits something of greatness because of perversity. More natural is the faint sub-plot intended to echo the central theme of the book in its story of Clare's hopeless love for Richard, at first reciprocated, and then blocked by Sir Austin and the girl's mother.

VII

In characterization, this novel excels. Its folk are persons and not alone types. Chief of the Feverel clan is Richard's father, Sir Austin, wounded by the infidelity of his wife and his friend, yet an intellectual egoist, proud of his plans for ruling the family and equally proud of his epigrams. Given less fully are Richard's aunt, the worldly mother of Clare, and his uncles—the guardsman Algernon, who has lost a leg at cricket, and crochety Hippias, "the dyspepsy." Of Richard's cousins one is sympathetic, and the other is Satanic. The first, Austin Wentworth, lives in disgrace for having repaired a youthful indiscretion by marrying a housemaid. As for the second, Adrian Harley, "the Wise Youth," he is Richard's tutor, whose heart has dropped to his stomach, a clever worldling and the contemner of honest passion, one of the most accomplished cynics of all literature. There are minor characters, too, but equally vital, from blunt Farmer Blaize and his son, and the disgruntled farm-hand Tom Bakewell, to Sir Austin's sentimental companion Lady Blandish, and Ripton, the faithful old dog.

Of the women three stand to the fore—Lucy, Mrs. Mount, and Mrs. Berry. The adorable Lucy is a northern Juliet brought to sudden maturity by her passion for Richard. Beneath him in birth, she is more than his equal in manner and mind and spirit. Though shown only in glimpses, she is never less than entrancing. Mrs. Mount is the dashing temptress, a little worn and half-hearted until piqued by Richard's indifference into playing her game more earnestly, and then exerting all the fascinations of the wicked. Most original of the three is Lucy's vulgar befriender, Mrs. Berry, a lovable "old-black-satin bunch," as Meredith tags her, wise but irrelevant, aware of the sensual springs beneath our polite pretenses, a Juliet's nurse grown mellow. It is to be noted, however, that none of these characters is really dynamic, unless it be Mrs. Doria Forey, who suffers a change of heart after sacrificing that of her daughter, and Richard who somewhat alters under the stress of his ordeal.

Subordinate to character, plot, and central idea, yet scarcely less effective in producing the total effect of the novel, are its setting, its style, and its author's point of view. Already Meredith's point of view has been defined as that of the writer of comedy. In the dinner scene at Richmond, for example, you are conscious of the author smiling apart upon callow Richard and Ripton caught in the snares of the demi-monde. It is Thackeray over again, letting us see the self-deception of Pendennis in his admiration of the Fotheringay. Sometimes, in this novel, Meredith apostrophizes his people, emitting lyrical exclamations of admiration or disgust at their conduct. More often, he remains aloof, though none the less present in spirit. Rarely does he here conform to Brownell's statement, more applicable to his later fictions, that: "He is not merely detached, he is obliterated. All he shows us of himself is his talent; his standpoint is to be divined."

That which especially reveals the author's standpoint is what Professor Saintsbury, in referring to this novel, has termed its "style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of strange ironic persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression." The persiflage appears, above all, in the speeches of the saturnine Adrian. As for the epigrams, their number is justified in part by supposing them to come from Sir Austin's collection entitled "The Pilgrim's Scrip." They abound, however, in the speech of others and in the narrative proper. Typical spicings of style are the following: "To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half traversed the world is youth's foolishness"; "It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account"; "If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to another"; "The ways of women, which are involution, and their practices, which are opposition, are generally best hit upon by guesswork and a bold word"; "The God of this world is in the machine, not out of it"; "Sentimentalism is a happy pastime and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a damning one to them who have anything to forfeit"; "The task of reclaiming a bad man is extremely seductive to good women. Dear to their tender hearts as old china is a bad man they are mending." Even illiterate Mrs. Berry talks in epigram, now on checked matrimony, which she holds to be as injurious as checked perspiration, and now on the wickedness of old people, which, she affirms, is the excuse for the wildness of young ones. "I think it's always the plan in a 'dielemmer,'" she says, "to pray God and walk forward." To Lucy, the bride, she gives this advice: "When the parlour fire gets low, put coals on the kitchen fire.... Don't neglect your cookery. Kissing don't last; cookery do."

Aside from its aphorisms, the style of Feverel is essentially clever, but by no means so artificial as that of Meredith's later novels. If a stage direction seem occasionally over-elaborate, as: "Adrian gesticulated an acquiesced withdrawal," others are felicitous, as: "At last Hippias perspired in conviction," or: "He set his sight hard at the blue ridges of the hills," or, of Ripton draining a bumper at a gulp: "The farthing rushlight of his reason leapt and expired. He tumbled to the sofa and there stretched." There are fine passages, too, of description, like those concerned with the boyish adventures of Richard and Ripton, the Ferdinand and Miranda meeting of hero and heroine, the temptation episode, and the storm in the German forest by night. "Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the country at the foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished.... Lower down the abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash; then white thrusts of light were darted from the sky, and great curving ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally agitated and vanished. Then a shrilling song roused in the leaves and the herbage. Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of the earth." Admirable, also, are the mere hints of background given in a flashing phrase that conjures up the scene: "Look at those old elm branches! How they seem to mix among the stars!—glittering prints of winter."

Taken all in all, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel may be reckoned as Meredith's masterpiece. "My old conviction grows stronger," writes Le Galliene, "that it will be Richard Feverel and perhaps no other of his novels ... that will keep his name alive in English literature." Certainly, Meredith has here allowed to his characters a charm of personality that later he tends to sacrifice in stressing their purely typical traits. He shows here a fire of sincerity rarely afterwards burning so brightly. He is less the mere essayist and more the lyric and dramatic tale-teller. He has set forth with skill the elements of a large problem, confirming the truth of Chesterton's remark that he combines subtlety with primal energy, and criticizes life without losing his appetite for it.

Frank Wadleigh Chandler.

University of Cincinnati.

THE ORDEAL OF
RICHARD FEVEREL

CHAPTER I

THE INMATES OF RAYNHAM ABBEY

Some years ago a book was published under the title of "The Pilgrim's Scrip." It consisted of a selection of original aphorisms by an anonymous gentleman, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised heart to the world.

He made no pretension to novelty. "Our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms," he wrote; by which avowal it may be seen that youth had manifestly gone from him, since he had ceased to be jealous of the ancients. There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for those days of intellectual coxcombry, when ideas come to us affecting the embraces of virgins, and swear to us they are ours alone, and no one else have they ever visited: and we believe them.

For an example of his ideas of the sex he said:

"I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man."

Some excitement was produced in the bosoms of ladies by so monstrous a scorn of them.

One adventurous person betook herself to the Heralds' College, and there ascertained that a Griffin between two Wheatsheaves, which stood on the title-page of the book, formed the crest of Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Baronet, of Raynham Abbey, in a certain Western county folding Thames: a man of wealth and honour, and a somewhat lamentable history.

The outline of the baronet's story was by no means new. He had a wife, and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was a beauty; his friend was a sort of poet. His wife had his whole heart, and his friend all his confidence. When he selected Denzil Somers from among his college chums, it was not on account of any similarity of disposition between them, but from his intense worship of genius, which made him overlook the absence of principle in his associate for the sake of such brilliant promise. Denzil had a small patrimony to lead off with, and that he dissipated before he left college; henceforth he was dependent upon his admirer, with whom he lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier poems, published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting in their moral tone, that his reputation was great among the virtuous, who form the larger portion of the English book-buying public. Election-seasons called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of the Tory party. Diaper possessed undoubted fluency, but did little, though Sir Austin was ever expecting much of him.

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off; and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband's friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

"For I am not the first who found
The name of Mary fatal!"

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.

Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one, and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In fact, he had been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for him.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved his wonted demeanour, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs. Doria Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and private, was, that the light thing who had taken flight was but a feather on her brother's Feverel-heart, and his ordinary course of life would be resumed. There are times when common men cannot bear the weight of just so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his brothers, thought him immensely improved by his misfortune, if the loss of such a person could be so designated; and seeing that Hippias received in consequence free quarters at Raynham, and possession of the wing of the Abbey she had inhabited, it is profitable to know his thoughts. If the baronet had given two or three blazing dinners in the great hall he would have deceived people generally, as he did his relatives and intimates. He was too sick for that: fit only for passive acting.

The nurse-maid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure darkening a lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so used to the sight as never to wake with a start. One night she was strangely aroused by a sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside the cot in his long black cloak and travelling cap. His fingers shaded a lamp, and reddened against the fitful darkness that ever and anon went leaping up the wall. She could hardly believe her senses to see the austere gentleman, dead silent, dropping tear upon tear before her eyes. She lay stone-still in a trance of terror and mournfulness, mechanically counting the tears as they fell, one by one. The hidden face, the fall and flash of those heavy drops in the light of the lamp he held, the upright, awful figure, agitated at regular intervals like a piece of clockwork by the low murderous catch of his breath: it was so piteous to her poor human nature that her heart began wildly palpitating. Involuntarily the poor girl cried out to him, "Oh, sir!" and fell a-weeping. Sir Austin turned the lamp on her pillow, and harshly bade her go to sleep, striding from the room forthwith. He dismissed her with a purse the next day.

Once, when he was seven years old, the little fellow woke up at night to see a lady bending over him. He talked of this the next day, but it was treated as a dream; until in the course of the day his uncle Algernon was driven home from Lobourne cricket-ground with a broken leg. Then it was recollected that there was a family ghost; and, though no member of the family believed in the ghost, none would have given up a circumstance that testified to its existence; for to possess a ghost is a distinction above titles.

Algernon Feverel lost his leg, and ceased to be a gentleman in the Guards. Of the other uncles of young Richard, Cuthbert, the sailor, perished in a spirited boat expedition against a slaving negro chief up the Niger. Some of the gallant lieutenant's trophies of war decorated the little boy's play-shed at Raynham, and he bequeathed his sword to Richard, whose hero he was. The diplomatist and beau, Vivian, ended his flutterings from flower to flower by making an improper marriage, as is the fate of many a beau, and was struck out of the list of visitors. Algernon generally occupied the baronet's disused town-house, a wretched being, dividing his time between horse and card exercise: possessed, it was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing his leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least, whenever he and his brother Hippias got together, they never failed to try whether one leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a puritan as Sir Austin was in his habits, he was too good a host, and too thorough a gentleman, to impose them upon his guests. The brothers, and other relatives, might do as they would while they did not disgrace the name, and then it was final: they must depart to behold his countenance no more.

Algernon Feverel was a simple man, who felt, subsequent to his misfortune, as he had perhaps dimly fancied it before, that his career lay in his legs, and was now irrevocably cut short. He taught the boy boxing, and shooting, and the arts of fence, and superintended the direction of his animal vigour with a melancholy vivacity. The remaining energies of Algernon's mind were devoted to animadversions on swift bowling. He preached it over the county, struggling through laborious literary compositions, addressed to sporting newspapers, on the Decline of Cricket. It was Algernon who witnessed and chronicled young Richard's first fight, which was with young Tom Blaize of Belthorpe Farm, three years the boy's senior.

Hippias Feverel was once thought to be the genius of the family. It was his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach; and, as one is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged in a perpetual contention with his dinner, Hippias forsook his prospects at the Bar, and, in the embraces of dyspepsia, compiled his ponderous work on the Fairy Mythology of Europe. He had little to do with the Hope of Raynham beyond what he endured from his juvenile tricks.

A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt Grantley, who had money to bequeath to the heir, occupied with Hippias the background of the house and shared her caudles with him. These two were seldom seen till the dinner-hour, for which they were all day preparing; and probably all night remembering, for the Eighteenth Century was an admirable trencherman, and cast age aside while there was a dish on the table.

Mrs. Doria Forey was the eldest of the three sisters of the baronet, a florid affable woman, with fine teeth, exceedingly fine light wavy hair, a Norman nose, and a reputation for understanding men; and that, with these practical creatures, always means the art of managing them. She had married an expectant younger son of a good family, who deceased before the fulfilment of his prospects; and, casting about in her mind the future chances of her little daughter and sole child, Clare, she marked down a probability. The far sight, the deep determination, the resolute perseverance of her sex, where a daughter is to be provided for and a man to be overthrown, instigated her to invite herself to Raynham, where, with that daughter, she fixed herself.

The other two Feverel ladies were the wife of Colonel Wentworth and the widow of Mr. Justice Harley: and the only thing remarkable about them was that they were mothers of sons of some distinction.

Austin Wentworth's story was of that wretched character which to be comprehended, that justice should be dealt him, must be told out and openly; which no one dares now do.

For a fault in early youth, redeemed by him nobly, according to his light, he was condemned to undergo the world's harsh judgment: not for the fault—for its atonement.

"—Married his mother's housemaid," whispered Mrs. Doria, with a ghastly look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments, which he was reputed to entertain.

"The compensation for Injustice," says the "Pilgrim's Scrip," "is, that in that dark Ordeal we gather the worthiest around us."

And the baronet's fair friend, Lady Blandish, and some few true men and women, held Austin Wentworth high.

He did not live with his wife; and Sir Austin, whose mind was bent on the future of our species, reproached him with being barren to posterity, while knaves were propagating.

The principal characteristic of the second nephew, Adrian Harley, was his sagacity. He was essentially the wise youth, both in counsel and in action.

"In action," the "Pilgrim's Scrip" observes, "Wisdom goes by majorities."

Adrian had an instinct for the majority, and, as the world invariably found him enlisted in its ranks, his appellation of wise youth was acquiesced in without irony.

The wise youth, then, had the world with him, but no friends. Nor did he wish for those troublesome appendages of success. He caused himself to be required by people who could serve him; feared by such as could injure. Not that he went out of the way to secure his end, or risked the expense of a plot. He did the work as easily as he ate his daily bread. Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our modern notions. To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character, was the wise youth's problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter of mortals also? Adrian had his laugh in his comfortable corner. He possessed peculiar attributes of a heathen God. He was a disposer of men: he was polished, luxurious, and happy—at their cost. He lived in eminent self-content, as one lying on soft cloud, lapt in sunshine. Nor Jove, nor Apollo, cast eye upon the maids of earth with cooler fire of selection, or pursued them in the covert with more sacred impunity. And he enjoyed his reputation for virtue as something additional. Stolen fruits are said to be sweet; undeserved rewards are exquisite.

The best of it was, that Adrian made no pretences. He did not solicit the favourable judgment of the world. Nature and he attempted no other concealment than the ordinary mask men wear. And yet the world would proclaim him moral, as well as wise, and the pleasing converse every way of his disgraced cousin Austin.

In a word, Adrian Harley had mastered his philosophy at the early age of one-and-twenty. Many would be glad to say the same at that age twice-told: they carry in their breasts a burden with which Adrian's was not loaded. Mrs. Doria was nearly right about his heart. A singular mishap (at his birth, possibly, or before it) had unseated that organ, and shaken it down to his stomach, where it was a much lighter, nay, an inspiring weight, and encouraged him merrily onward. Throned there it looked on little that did not arrive to gratify it. Already that region was a trifle prominent in the person of the wise youth, and carried, as it were, the flag of his philosophical tenets in front of him. He was charming after dinner, with men or with women: delightfully sarcastic: perhaps a little too unscrupulous in his moral tone, but that his moral reputation belied him, and it must be set down to generosity of disposition.

Such was Adrian Harley, another of Sir Austin's intellectual favourites, chosen from mankind to superintend the education of his son at Raynham. Adrian had been destined for the Church. He did not enter into Orders. He and the baronet had a conference together one day, and from that time Adrian became a fixture in the Abbey. His father died in his promising son's college term, bequeathing him nothing but his legal complexion, and Adrian became stipendiary officer in his uncle's household.

A playfellow of Richard's occasionally, and the only comrade of his age that he ever saw, was Master Ripton Thompson, the son of Sir Austin's solicitor, a boy without a character.

A comrade of some description was necessary, for Richard was neither to go to school nor to college. Sir Austin considered that the schools were corrupt, and maintained that young lads might by parental vigilance be kept pretty secure from the Serpent until Eve sided with him: a period that might be deferred, he said. He had a system of education for his son. How it worked we shall see.

CHAPTER II

SHOWING HOW THE FATES SELECTED THE FOURTEENTH
BIRTHDAY TO TRY THE STRENGTH OF THE SYSTEM

October shone royally on Richard's fourteenth birthday. The brown beechwoods and golden birches glowed to a brilliant sun. Banks of moveless cloud hung about the horizon, mounded to the west, where slept the wind. Promise of a great day for Raynham, as it proved to be, though not in the manner marked out.

Already archery-booths and cricketing-tents were rising on the lower grounds towards the river, whither the lads of Bursley and Lobourne, in boats and in carts, shouting for a day of ale and honour, jogged merrily to match themselves anew, and pluck at the living laurel from each other's brows, like manly Britons. The whole park was beginning to be astir and resound with holiday cries. Sir Austin Feverel, a thorough good Tory, was no game-preserver, and could be popular whenever he chose, which Sir Miles Papworth, on the other side of the river, a fast-handed Whig and terror to poachers, never could be. Half the village of Lobourne was seen trooping through the avenues of the park. Fiddlers and gipsies clamoured at the gates for admission; white smocks, and slate, surmounted by hats of serious brim, and now and then a scarlet cloak, smacking of the old country, dotted the grassy sweeps to the levels.

And all the time the star of these festivities was receding further and further, and eclipsing himself with his reluctant serf Ripton, who kept asking what they were to do and where they were going, and how late it was in the day, and suggesting that the lads of Lobourne would be calling out for them, and Sir Austin requiring their presence, without getting any attention paid to his misery or remonstrances. For Richard had been requested by his father to submit to medical examination like a boor enlisting for a soldier, and he was in great wrath.

He was flying as though he would have flown from the shameful thought of what had been asked of him. By-and-by he communicated his sentiments to Ripton, who said they were those of a girl: an offensive remark, remembering which, Richard, after they had borrowed a couple of guns at the bailiff's farm, and Ripton had fired badly, called his friend a fool.

Feeling that circumstances were making him look wonderfully like one, Ripton lifted his head and retorted defiantly, "I'm not!"

This angry contradiction, so very uncalled for, annoyed Richard, who was still smarting at the loss of the birds, owing to Ripton's bad shot, and was really the injured party. He therefore bestowed the abusive epithet on Ripton anew, and with increase of emphasis.

"You shan't call me so, then, whether I am or not," says Ripton, and sucks his lips.

This was becoming personal. Richard sent up his brows, and stared at his defier an instant. He then informed him that he certainly should call him so, and would not object to call him so twenty times.

"Do it, and see!" returns Ripton, rocking on his feet, and breathing quick.

With a gravity of which only boys and other barbarians are capable, Richard went through the entire number, stressing the epithet to increase the defiance and avoid monotony, as he progressed, while Ripton bobbed his head every time in assent, as it were, to his comrade's accuracy, and as a record for his profound humiliation. The dog they had with them gazed at the extraordinary performance with interrogating wags of the tail.

Twenty times, duly and deliberately, Richard repeated the obnoxious word.

At the twentieth solemn iteration of Ripton's capital shortcoming, Ripton delivered a smart back-hander on Richard's mouth, and squared precipitately; perhaps sorry when the deed was done, for he was a kind-hearted lad, and as Richard simply bowed in acknowledgment of the blow he thought he had gone too far. He did not know the young gentleman he was dealing with. Richard was extremely cool.

"Shall we fight here?" he said.

"Anywhere you like," replied Ripton.

"A little more into the wood, I think. We may be interrupted." And Richard led the way with a courteous reserve that somewhat chilled Ripton's ardour for the contest. On the skirts of the wood, Richard threw off his jacket and waistcoat, and, quite collected, waited for Ripton to do the same. The latter boy was flushed and restless; older and broader, but not so tight-limbed and well-set. The Gods, sole witnesses of their battle, betted dead against him. Richard had mounted the white cockade of the Feverels, and there was a look in him that asked for tough work to extinguish. His brows, slightly lined upward at the temples, converging to a knot about the well-set straight nose; his full grey eyes, open nostrils, and planted feet, and a gentlemanly air of calm and alertness, formed a spirited picture of a young combatant. As for Ripton, he was all abroad, and fought in schoolboy style—that is, he rushed at the foe head foremost, and struck like a windmill. He was a lumpy boy. When he did hit, he made himself felt; but he was at the mercy of science. To see him come dashing in, blinking and puffing and whirling his arms abroad while the felling blow went straight between them, you perceived that he was fighting a fight of desperation, and knew it. For the dreaded alternative glared him in the face that, if he yielded, he must look like what he had been twenty times calumniously called; and he would die rather than yield, and swing his windmill till he dropped. Poor boy! he dropped frequently. The gallant fellow fought for appearances, and down he went. The Gods favour one of two parties. Prince Turnus was a noble youth; but he had not Pallas at his elbow. Ripton was a capital boy; he had no science. He could not prove he was not a fool! When one comes to think of it, Ripton did choose the only possible way, and we should all of us have considerable difficulty in proving the negative by any other. Ripton came on the unerring fist again and again; and if it was true, as he said in short colloquial gasps, that he required as much beating as an egg to be beaten thoroughly, a fortunate interruption alone saved our friend from resembling that substance. The boys heard summoning voices, and beheld Mr. Morton of Poer Hall and Austin Wentworth stepping towards them.

A truce was sounded, jackets were caught up, guns shouldered, and off they trotted in concert through the depths of the wood, not stopping till that and half-a-dozen fields and a larch plantation were well behind them.

When they halted to take breath, there was a mutual study of faces. Ripton's was much discoloured, and looked fiercer with its natural war-paint than the boy felt. Nevertheless, he squared up dauntlessly on the new ground, and Richard, whose wrath was appeased, could not refrain from asking him whether he had not really had enough.

"Never!" shouts the noble enemy.

"Well, look here," said Richard, appealing to common sense, "I'm tired of knocking you down. I'll say you're not a fool, if you'll give me your hand."

Ripton demurred an instant to consult with honour, who bade him catch at his chance.

He held out his hand. "There!" and the boys grasped hands and were fast friends. Ripton had gained his point, and Richard decidedly had the best of it. So they were on equal ground. Both could claim a victory, which was all the better for their friendship.

Ripton washed his face and comforted his nose at a brook, and was now ready to follow his friend wherever he chose to lead. They continued to beat about for birds. The birds on the Raynham estates were found singularly cunning, and repeatedly eluded the aim of these prime shots, so they pushed their expedition into the lands of their neighbours, in search of a stupider race, happily oblivious of the laws and conditions of trespass; unconscious, too, that they were poaching on the demesne of the notorious Farmer Blaize, the free-trade farmer under the shield of the Papworths, no worshipper of the Griffin between two Wheatsheaves; destined to be much allied with Richard's fortunes from beginning to end. Farmer Blaize hated poachers, and especially young chaps poaching, who did it mostly from impudence. He heard the audacious shots popping right and left, and going forth to have a glimpse at the intruders, and observing their size, swore he would teach my gentlemen a thing, lords or no lords.

Richard had brought down a beautiful cock-pheasant, and was exulting over it, when the farmer's portentous figure burst upon them, cracking an avenging horsewhip. His salute was ironical.

"Havin' good sport, gentlemen, are ye?"

"Just bagged a splendid bird!" radiant Richard informed him.

"Oh!" Farmer Blaize gave an admonitory flick of the whip.

"Just let me clap eye on't, then."

"Say, please," interposed Ripton, who was not blind to doubtful aspects.

Farmer Blaize threw up his chin, and grinned grimly.

"Please to you, sir? Why, my chap, you looks as if ye didn't much mind what come t'yer nose, I reckon. You looks an old poacher, you do. Tall ye what 'tis!" He changed his banter to business, "That bird's mine! Now you jest hand him over, and sheer off, you dam young scoundrels! I know ye!" And he became exceedingly opprobrious, and uttered contempt of the name of Feverel.

Richard opened his eyes.

"If you wants to be horsewhipped, you'll stay where y'are!" continued the farmer. "Giles Blaize never stands nonsense!"

"Then we'll stay," quoth Richard.

"Good! so be't! If you will have't, have't, my men!"

As a preparatory measure, Farmer Blaize seized a wing of the bird, on which both boys flung themselves desperately, and secured it minus the pinion.

"That's your game," cried the farmer. "Here's a taste of horsewhip for ye. I never stands nonsense!" and sweetch went the mighty whip, well swayed. The boys tried to close with him. He kept his distance and lashed without mercy. Black blood was made by Farmer Blaize that day! The boys wriggled, in spite of themselves. It was like a relentless serpent coiling, and biting, and stinging their young veins to madness. Probably they felt the disgrace of the contortions they were made to go through more than the pain, but the pain was fierce, for the farmer laid about from a practised arm, and did not consider that he had done enough till he was well breathed and his ruddy jowl inflamed. He paused, to receive the remainder of the cock-pheasant in his face.

"Take your beastly bird," cried Richard.

"Money, my lads, and interest," roared the farmer, lashing out again.

Shameful as it was to retreat, there was but that course open to them. They decided to surrender the field.

"Look! you big brute," Richard shook his gun, hoarse with passion, "I'd have shot you, if I'd been loaded. Mind! if I come across you when I'm loaded, you coward, I'll fire!"

The un-English nature of this threat exasperated Farmer Blaize, and he pressed the pursuit in time to bestow a few farewell stripes as they were escaping tight-breeched into neutral territory. At the hedge they parleyed a minute, the farmer to inquire if they had had a mortal good tanning and were satisfied, for when they wanted a further instalment of the same they were to come for it to Belthorpe Farm, and there it was in pickle: The boys meantime exploding in menaces and threats of vengeance, on which the farmer contemptuously turned his back. Ripton had already stocked an armful of flints for the enjoyment of a little skirmishing. Richard, however, knocked them all out, saying, "No! Gentlemen don't fling stones; leave that to the blackguards."

"Just one shy at him!" pleaded Ripton, with his eye on Farmer Blaize's broad mark, and his whole mind drunken with a sudden revelation of the advantages of light troops in opposition to heavies.

"No," said Richard, imperatively, "no stones," and marched briskly away. Ripton followed with a sigh. His leader's magnanimity was wholly beyond him. A good spanking mark at the farmer would have relieved Master Ripton; it would have done nothing to console Richard Feverel for the ignominy he had been compelled to submit to. Ripton was familiar with the rod, a monster much despoiled of his terrors by intimacy. Birch-fever was past with this boy. The horrible sense of shame, self-loathing, universal hatred, impotent vengeance, as if the spirit were steeped in abysmal blackness, which comes upon a courageous and sensitive youth condemned for the first time to taste this piece of fleshly bitterness, and suffer what he feels is a defilement, Ripton had weathered and forgotten. He was seasoned wood, and took the world pretty wisely; not reckless of castigation, as some boys become, nor oversensitive as to dishonour, as his friend and comrade beside him was.

Richard's blood was poisoned. He had the fever on him severely. He would not allow stone-flinging, because it was a habit of his to discountenance it. Mere gentlemanly considerations had scarce shielded Farmer Blaize, and certain very ungentlemanly schemes were coming to ghastly heads in the tumult of his brain; rejected solely from their glaring impracticability even to his young intelligence. A sweeping and consummate vengeance for the indignity alone should satisfy him. Something tremendous must be done, and done without delay. At one moment he thought of killing all the farmer's cattle; next of killing him; challenging him to single combat with the arms, and according to the fashion of gentlemen. But the farmer was a coward; he would refuse. Then he, Richard Feverel, would stand by the farmer's bedside, and rouse him; rouse him to fight with powder and ball in his own chamber, in the cowardly midnight, where he might tremble, but dare not refuse.

"Lord!" cried simple Ripton, while these hopeful plots were raging in his comrade's brain, now sparkling for immediate execution, and anon lapsing disdainfully dark in their chances of fulfilment, "how I wish you'd have let me notch him, Ricky! I'm a safe shot. I never miss. I should feel quite jolly if I'd spanked him once. We should have had the best of him at that game. I say!" and a sharp thought drew Ripton's ideas nearer home, "I wonder whether my nose is as bad as he says! Where can I see myself?"

To these exclamations Richard was deaf, and he trudged steadily forward, facing but one object.

After tearing through innumerable hedges, leaping fences, jumping dykes, penetrating brambly copses, and getting dirty, ragged, and tired, Ripton awoke from his dream of Farmer Blaize and a blue nose to the vivid consciousness of hunger; and this grew with the rapidity of light upon him, till in the course of another minute he was enduring the extremes of famine, and ventured to question his leader whither he was being conducted. Raynham was out of sight. They were a long way down the valley, miles from Lobourne, in a country of sour pools, yellow brooks, rank pasturage, desolate heath. Solitary cows were seen; the smoke of a mud cottage; a cart piled with peat; a donkey grazing at leisure, oblivious of an unkind world; geese by a horse-pond, gabbling as in the first loneliness of creation; uncooked things that a famishing boy cannot possibly care for, and must despise. Ripton was in despair.

"Where are you going to?" he inquired with a voice of the last time of asking, and halted resolutely.

Richard now broke his silence to reply, "Anywhere."

"Anywhere!" Ripton took up the moody word. "But ain't you awfully hungry?" he gasped vehemently, in a way that showed the total emptiness of his stomach.

"No," was Richard's brief response.

"Not hungry!" Ripton's amazement lent him increased vehemence. "Why, you haven't had anything to eat since breakfast! Not hungry? I declare I'm starving. I feel such a gnawing I could eat dry bread and cheese!"

Richard sneered: not for reasons that would have actuated a similar demonstration of the philosopher.

"Come," cried Ripton, "at all events, tell us where you're going to stop."

Richard faced about to make a querulous retort. The injured and hapless visage that met his eye disarmed him. The lad's nose, though not exactly of the dreaded hue, was really becoming discoloured. To upbraid him would be cruel. Richard lifted his head, surveyed the position, and exclaiming "Here!" dropped down on a withered bank, leaving Ripton to contemplate him as a puzzle whose every new move was a worse perplexity.

CHAPTER III

THE MAGIAN CONFLICT

Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes, not written or formally taught, but intuitively understood by all, and invariably acted upon by the loyal and the true. The race is not nearly civilized, we must remember. Thus, not to follow your leader whithersoever he may think proper to lead; to back out of an expedition because the end of it frowns dubious, and the present fruit of it is discomfort; to quit a comrade on the road, and return home without him: these are tricks which no boy of spirit would be guilty of, let him come to any description of mortal grief in consequence. Better so than have his own conscience denouncing him sneak. Some boys who behave boldly enough are not troubled by this conscience, and the eyes and the lips of their fellows have to supply the deficiency. They do it with just as haunting, and even more horrible pertinacity, than the inner voice, and the result, if the probation be not very severe and searching, is the same. The leader can rely on the faithfulness of his host: the comrade is sworn to serve. Master Ripton Thompson was naturally loyal. The idea of turning off and forsaking his friend never once crossed his mind, though his condition was desperate, and his friend's behaviour that of a Bedlamite. He announced several times impatiently that they would be too late for dinner. His friend did not budge. Dinner seemed nothing to him. There he lay plucking grass, and patting the old dog's nose, as if incapable of conceiving what a thing hunger was. Ripton took half-a-dozen turns up and down, and at last flung himself down beside the taciturn boy, accepting his fate.

Now, the chance that works for certain purposes sent a smart shower from the sinking sun, and the wet sent two strangers for shelter in the lane behind the hedge where the boys reclined. One was a travelling tinker, who lit a pipe and spread a tawny umbrella. The other was a burly young countryman, pipeless and tentless. They saluted with a nod, and began recounting for each other's benefit the day-long doings of the weather, as it had affected their individual experience and followed their prophecies. Both had anticipated and foretold a bit of rain before night, and therefore both welcomed the wet with satisfaction. A monotonous betweenwhiles kind of talk they kept droning, in harmony with the still hum of the air. From the weather theme they fell upon the blessings of tobacco; how it was the poor man's friend, his company, his consolation, his comfort, his refuge at night, his first thought in the morning.

"Better than a wife!" chuckled the tinker. "No curtain-lecturin' with a pipe. Your pipe an't a shrew."

"That be it!" the other chimed in. "Your pipe doan't mak' ye out wi' all the cash Saturday evenin'."

"Take one," said the tinker, in the enthusiasm of the moment, handing a grimy short clay. Speed-the-Plough filled from the tinker's pouch, and continued his praises.

"Penny a day, and there y'are, primed! Better than a wife? Ha, ha!"

"And you can get rid of it, if ye wants for to, and when ye wants," added tinker.

"So ye can!" Speed-the-Plough took him up. "And ye doan't want for to. Leastways, t'other case. I means pipe."

"And," continued tinker, comprehending him perfectly, "it don't bring repentance after it."

"Not nohow, master, it doan't! And"—Speed-the-Plough cocked his eye—"it doan't eat up half the victuals, your pipe doan't."

Here the honest yeoman gesticulated his keen sense of a clincher, which the tinker acknowledged; and having, so to speak, sealed up the subject by saying the best thing that could be said, the two smoked for some time in silence to the drip and patter of the shower.

Ripton solaced his wretchedness by watching them through the briar hedge. He saw the tinker stroking a white cat, and appealing to her, every now and then, as his missus, for an opinion or a confirmation; and he thought that a curious sight. Speed-the-Plough was stretched at full length, with his boots in the rain, and his head amidst the tinker's pots, smoking, profoundly contemplative. The minutes seemed to be taken up alternately by the grey puffs from their mouths.

It was the tinker who renewed the colloquy. Said he, "Times is bad!"

His companion assented, "Sure-ly!"

"But it somehow comes round right," resumed the tinker. "Why, look here. Where's the good o' moping? I sees it all come round right and tight. Now I travels about. I've got my beat. 'Casion calls me t'other day to Newcastle!—Eh?"

"Coals!" ejaculated Speed-the-Plough sonorously.

"Coals!" echoed the tinker. "You ask what I goes there for, mayhap? Never you mind. One sees a mort o' life in my trade. Not for coals it isn't. And I don't carry 'em there, neither. Anyhow, I comes back. London's my mark. Says I, I'll see a bit o' the sea, and steps aboard a collier. We were as nigh wrecked as the prophet Paul."

"—A—who's him?" the other wished to know.

"Read your Bible," said the tinker. "We pitched and tossed—'tain't that game at sea 'tis on land, I can tell ye! I thinks, down we're a-going—say your prayers, Bob Tiles! That was a night, to be sure! But God's above the devil, and here I am, ye see."

Speed-the-Plough lurched round on his elbow and regarded him indifferently. "D'ye call that doctrin'? He bean't al'ays, or I shoo'n't be scrapin' my heels wi' nothin' to do, and, what's warse, nothin' to eat. Why, look heer. Luck's luck, and bad luck's the contrary. Varmer Bollop, t'other day, has's rick burnt down. Next night his gran'ry's burnt. What do he tak' and go and do? He takes and goes and hangs unsel', and turns us out of his employ. God warn't above the devil then, I thinks, or I can't make out the reckonin'."

The tinker cleared his throat, and said it was a bad case.

"And a darn'd bad case. I'll tak' my oath on't!" cried Speed-the-Plough. "Well, look heer! Heer's another darn'd bad case. I threshed for Varmer Blaize—Blaize o' Beltharpe—afore I goes to Varmer Bollop. Varmer Blaize misses pilkins. He swears our chaps steals pilkins. 'Twarn't me steals 'em. What do he tak' and go and do? He takes and tarns us off, me and another, neck and crop, to scuffle about and starve, for all he keers. God warn't above the devil then, I thinks. Not nohow, as I can see!"

The tinker shook his head, and said that was a bad case also.

"And you can't mend it," added Speed-the-Plough. "It's bad, and there it be. But I'll tell ye what, master. Bad wants payin' for." He nodded and winked mysteriously. "Bad has its wages as well's honest work, I'm thinkin'. Varmer Bollop I don't owe no grudge to: Varmer Blaize I do. And I shud like to stick a Lucifer in his rick some dry windy night." Speed-the-Plough screwed up an eye villainously. "He wants hittin' in the wind,—jest where the pocket is, master, do Varmer Blaize, and he'll cry out 'O Lor'!' Varmer Blaize will. You won't get the better o' Varmer Blaize by no means, as I makes out, if ye doan't hit into him jest there."

The tinker sent a rapid succession of white clouds from his mouth, and said that would be taking the devil's side of a bad case. Speed-the-Plough observed energetically that, if Farmer Blaize was on the other, he should be on that side.

There was a young gentleman close by, who thought with him. The hope of Raynham had lent a careless half-compelled attention to the foregoing dialogue, wherein a common labourer and a travelling tinker had propounded and discussed one of the most ancient theories of transmundane dominion and influence on mundane affairs. He now started to his feet, and came tearing through the briar hedge, calling out for one of them to direct them the nearest road to Bursley. The tinker was kindling preparations for his tea, under the tawny umbrella. A loaf was set forth, on which Ripton's eyes, stuck in the hedge, fastened ravenously. Speed-the-Plough volunteered information that Bursley was a good three mile from where they stood, and a good eight mile from Lobourne.

"I'll give you half-a-crown for that loaf, my good fellow," said Richard to the tinker.

"It's a bargain," quoth the tinker, "eh, missus?"

His cat replied by humping her back at the dog.

The half-crown was tossed down, and Ripton, who had just succeeded in freeing his limbs from the briar, prickly as a hedgehog, collared the loaf.

"Those young squires be sharp-set, and no mistake," said the tinker to his companion. "Come! we'll to Bursley after 'em, and talk it out over a pot o' beer." Speed-the-Plough was nothing loath, and in a short time they were following the two lads on the road to Bursley, while a horizontal blaze shot across the autumn land from the Western edge of the rain-cloud.

CHAPTER IV

ARSON

Search for the missing boys had been made everywhere over Raynham, and Sir Austin was in grievous discontent. None had seen them save Austin Wentworth and Mr. Morton. The baronet sat construing their account of the flight of the lads when they were hailed, and resolved it into an act of rebellion on the part of his son. At dinner he drank the young heir's health in ominous silence. Adrian Harley stood up in his place to propose the health. His speech was a fine piece of rhetoric. He warmed in it till, after the Ciceronic model, inanimate objects were personified, and Richard's table-napkin and vacant chair were invoked to follow the steps of a peerless father, and uphold with his dignity the honour of the Feverels. Austin Wentworth, whom a soldier's death compelled to take his father's place in support of the toast, was tame after such magniloquence. But the reply, the thanks which young Richard should have delivered in person were not forthcoming. Adrian's oratory had given but a momentary life to napkin and chair. The company of honoured friends, and aunts, and uncles, and remotest cousins, were glad to disperse and seek amusement in music and tea. Sir Austin did his utmost to be hospitably cheerful, and requested them to dance. If he had desired them to laugh he would have been obeyed, and in as hearty a manner.

"How triste!" said Mrs. Doria Forey to Lobourne's curate, as that most enamoured automaton went through his paces beside her with professional stiffness.

"One who does not suffer can hardly assent," the curate answered, basking in her beams.

"Ah, you are good!" exclaimed the lady. "Look at my Clare. She will not dance on her cousin's birthday with any one but him. What are we to do to enliven these people?"

"Alas, madam! you cannot do for all what you do for one," the curate sighed, and wherever she wandered in discourse, drew her back with silken strings to gaze on his enamoured soul.

He was the only gratified stranger present. The others had designs on the young heir. Lady Attenbury of Longford House had brought her highly-polished specimen of marketware, the Lady Juliana Jaye, for a first introduction to him, thinking he had arrived at an age to estimate and pine for her black eyes and pretty pert mouth. The Lady Juliana had to pair off with a dapper Papworth, and her mama was subjected to the gallantries of Sir Miles, who talked land and steam-engines to her till she was sick, and had to be impertinent in self-defence. Lady Blandish, the delightful widow, sat apart with Adrian, and enjoyed his sarcasms on the company. By ten at night the poor show ended, and the rooms were dark, dark as the prognostics multitudinously hinted by the disappointed and chilled guests concerning the probable future of the hope of Raynham. Little Clare kissed her mama, curtsied to the lingering curate, and went to bed like a very good girl. Immediately the maid had departed, little Clare deliberately exchanged night attire for that of day. She was noted as an obedient child. Her light was always allowed to burn in her room for half-an-hour, to counteract her fears of the dark. She took the light, and stole on tiptoe to Richard's room. No Richard was there. She peeped in further and further. A trifling agitation of the curtains shot her back through the door and along the passage to her own bedchamber with extreme expedition. She was not much alarmed, but feeling guilty she was on her guard. In a short time she was prowling about the passages again. Richard had slighted and offended the little lady, and was to be asked whether he did not repent such conduct toward his cousin; not to be asked whether he had forgotten to receive his birthday kiss from her; for, if he did not choose to remember that, Miss Clare would never remind him of it, and to-night should be his last chance of a reconciliation. Thus she meditated, sitting on a stair, and presently heard Richard's voice below in the hall, shouting for supper.

"Master Richard has returned," old Benson the butler tolled out intelligence to Sir Austin.

"Well?" said the baronet.

"He complains of being hungry," the butler hesitated, with a look of solemn disgust.

"Let him eat."

Heavy Benson hesitated still more as he announced that the boy had called for wine. It was an unprecedented thing. Sir Austin's brows were portending an arch, but Adrian suggested that he wanted possibly to drink his birthday, and claret was conceded.

The boys were in the vortex of a partridge-pie when Adrian strolled in to them. They had now changed characters. Richard was uproarious. He drank a health with every glass; his cheeks were flushed and his eyes brilliant. Ripton looked very much like a rogue on the tremble of detection, but his honest hunger and the partridge-pie shielded him awhile from Adrian's scrutinizing glance. Adrian saw there was matter for study, if it were only on Master Ripton's betraying nose, and sat down to hear and mark.

"Good sport, gentlemen, I trust to hear?" he began his quiet banter, and provoked a loud peal of laughter from Richard.

"Ha, ha! I say, Rip: 'Havin' good sport, gentlemen, are ye?' You remember the farmer! Your health, parson! We haven't had our sport yet. We're going to have some first-rate sport. Oh, well! we haven't much show of birds. We shot for pleasure, and returned them to the proprietors. You're fond of game, parson! Ripton is a dead shot in what Cousin Austin calls the Kingdom of 'would-have-done' and 'might-have-been.' Up went the birds, and cries Rip, 'I've forgotten to load!' Oh, ho!—Rip! some more claret—Do just leave that nose of yours alone.—Your health, Ripton Thompson! The birds hadn't the decency to wait for him, and so, parson, it's their fault, and not Rip's, you haven't a dozen brace at your feet. What have you been doing at home, Cousin Rady?"

"Playing Hamlet, in the absence of the Prince of Denmark. The day without you, my dear boy, must be dull, you know."

"'He speaks: can I trust what he says is sincere?
There's an edge to his smile that cuts much like a sneer.'

Sandoe's poems! You know the couplet, Mr. Rady. Why shouldn't I quote Sandoe? You know you like him, Rady. But, if you've missed me, I'm sorry. Rip and I have had a beautiful day. We've made new acquaintances. We've seen the world. I'm the monkey that has seen the world, and I'm going to tell you all about it. First, there's a gentleman who takes a rifle for a fowling-piece. Next, there's a farmer who warns everybody, gentleman and beggar, off his premises. Next, there's a tinker and a ploughman, who think that God is always fighting with the devil which shall command the kingdoms of the earth. The tinker's for God, and the ploughman"——

"I'll drink your health, Ricky," said Adrian, interrupting.

"Oh, I forgot, parson;—I mean no harm, Adrian. I'm only telling what I've heard."

"No harm, my dear boy," returned Adrian. "I'm perfectly aware that Zoroaster is not dead. You have been listening to a common creed. Drink the Fire-worshippers, if you will."

"Here's to Zoroaster, then!" cried Richard. "I say, Rippy! we'll drink the Fire-worshippers to-night, won't we?"

A fearful conspiratorial frown, that would not have disgraced Guido Fawkes, was darted back from the plastic features of Master Ripton.

Richard gave his lungs loud play.

"Why, what did you say about Blaizes, Rippy? Didn't you say it was fun?"

Another hideous and silencing frown was Ripton's answer. Adrian watched the innocent youths, and knew that there was talking under the table. "See," thought he, "this boy has tasted his first scraggy morsel of life to-day, and already he talks like an old stager, and has, if I mistake not, been acting too. My respected chief," he apostrophized Sir Austin, "combustibles are only the more dangerous for compression. This boy will be ravenous for Earth when he is let loose, and very soon make his share of it look as foolish as yonder game-pie!"—a prophecy Adrian kept to himself.

Uncle Algernon shambled in to see his nephew before the supper was finished, and his more genial presence brought out a little of the plot.

"Look here, uncle!" said Richard. "Would you let a churlish old brute of a farmer strike you without making him suffer for it?"

"I fancy I should return the compliment, my lad," replied his uncle.

"Of course you would! So would I. And he shall suffer for it." The boy looked savage, and his uncle patted him down.

"I've boxed his son; I'll box him," said Richard, shouting for more wine.

"What, boy! Is it old Blaize has been putting you up?"

"Never mind, uncle!" The boy nodded mysteriously.

Look there! Adrian read on Ripton's face, he says "never mind," and lets it out!

"Did we beat to-day, uncle?"

"Yes, boy; and we'd beat them any day they bowl fair. I'd beat them on one leg. There's only Natkins and Featherdene among them worth a farthing."

"We beat!" cries Richard. "Then we'll have some more wine, and drink their healths."

The bell was rung; wine ordered. Presently comes in heavy Benson, to say supplies are cut off. One bottle, and no more. The Captain whistled; Adrian shrugged.

The bottle, however, was procured by Adrian subsequently. He liked studying intoxicated urchins.

One subject was at Richard's heart, about which he was reserved in the midst of his riot. Too proud to inquire how his father had taken his absence, he burned to hear whether he was in disgrace. He led to it repeatedly, and it was constantly evaded by Algernon and Adrian. At last, when the boy declared a desire to wish his father good-night, Adrian had to tell him that he was to go straight to bed from the supper-table. Young Richard's face fell at that, and his gaiety forsook him. He marched to his room without another word.

Adrian gave Sir Austin an able version of his son's behaviour and adventures; dwelling upon this sudden taciturnity when he heard of his father's resolution not to see him. The wise youth saw that his chief was mollified behind his moveless mask, and went to bed, and Horace, leaving Sir Austin in his study. Long hours the baronet sat alone. The house had not its usual influx of Feverels that day. Austin Wentworth was staying at Poer Hall, and had only come over for an hour. At midnight the house breathed sleep. Sir Austin put on his cloak and cap, and took the lamp to make his rounds. He apprehended nothing special, but with a mind never at rest he constituted himself the sentinel of Raynham. He passed the chamber where the Great-Aunt Grantley lay, who was to swell Richard's fortune, and so perform her chief business on earth. By her door he murmured, "Good creature! you sleep with a sense of duty done," and paced on, reflecting, "She has not made money a demon of discord," and blessed her. He had his thoughts at Hippias's somnolent door, and to them the world might have subscribed.

A monomaniac at large, watching over sane people in slumber! thinks Adrian Harley, as he hears Sir Austin's footfall, and truly that was a strange object to see.—Where is the fortress that has not one weak gate? where the man who is sound at each particular angle? Ay, meditates the recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every mother's son? Favourable circumstances—good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly adhered to—keep the world out of Bedlam. But, let the world fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam the safest abode for it?

Sir Austin ascended the stairs, and bent his steps leisurely toward the chamber where his son was lying in the left wing of the Abbey. At the end of the gallery which led to it he discovered a dim light. Doubting it an illusion, Sir Austin accelerated his pace. This wing had aforetime a bad character. Notwithstanding what years had done to polish it into fair repute, the Raynham kitchen stuck to tradition, and preserved certain stories of ghosts seen there, that effectually blackened it in the susceptible minds of new housemaids and under-cooks, whose fears would not allow the sinner to wash his sins. Sir Austin had heard of the tales circulated by his domestics underground. He cherished his own belief, but discouraged theirs, and it was treason at Raynham to be caught traducing the left wing. As the baronet advanced, the fact of a light burning was clear to him. A slight descent brought him into the passage, and he beheld a poor human candle standing outside his son's chamber. At the same moment a door closed hastily. He entered Richard's room. The boy was absent. The bed was unpressed: no clothes about: nothing to show that he had been there that night. Sir Austin felt vaguely apprehensive. Has he gone to my room to await me? thought the father's heart. Something like a tear quivered in his arid eyes as he meditated and hoped this might be so. His own sleeping-room faced that of his son. He strode to it with a quick heart. It was empty. Alarm dislodged anger from his jealous heart, and dread of evil put a thousand questions to him that were answered in air. After pacing up and down his room he determined to go and ask the boy Thompson, as he called Ripton, what was known to him.

The chamber assigned to Master Ripton Thompson was at the northern extremity of the passage, and overlooked Lobourne and the valley to the West. The bed stood between the window and the door. Sir Austin found the door ajar, and the interior dark. To his surprise, the boy Thompson's couch, as revealed by the rays of his lamp, was likewise vacant. He was turning back when he fancied he heard the sibilation of a whispering in the room. Sir Austin cloaked the lamp and trod silently toward the window. The heads of his son Richard and the boy Thompson were seen crouched against the glass, holding excited converse together. Sir Austin listened, but he listened to a language of which he possessed not the key. Their talk was of fire, and of delay: of expected agrarian astonishment: of a farmer's huge wrath: of violence exercised upon gentlemen, and of vengeance: talk that the boys jerked out by fits, and that came as broken links of a chain impossible to connect. But they awoke curiosity. The baronet condescended to play the spy upon his son.

Over Lobourne and the valley lay black night and innumerable stars.

"How jolly I feel!" exclaimed Ripton, inspired by claret; and then, after a luxurious pause—"I think that fellow has pocketed his guinea, and cut his lucky."

Richard allowed a long minute to pass, during which the baronet waited anxiously for his voice, hardly recognizing it when he heard its altered tones.

"If he has, I'll go; and I'll do it myself."

"You would?" returned Master Ripton. "Well, I'm hanged!—I say, if you went to school, wouldn't you get into rows! Perhaps he hasn't found the place where the box was stuck in. I think he funks it. I almost wish you hadn't done it, upon my honour—eh? Look there! what was that? That looked like something.—I say! do you think we shall ever be found out?"

Master Ripton intoned this abrupt interrogation very seriously.

"I don't think about it," said Richard, all his faculties bent on signs from Lobourne.

"Well, but," Ripton persisted, "suppose we are found out?"

"If we are, I must pay for it."

Sir Austin breathed the better for this reply. He was beginning to gather a clue to the dialogue. His son was engaged in a plot, and was, moreover, the leader of the plot. He listened for further enlightenment.

"What was the fellow's name?" inquired Ripton.

His companion answered, "Tom Bakewell."

"I'll tell you what," continued Ripton. "You let it all clean out to your cousin and uncle at supper. How capital claret is with partridge-pie! What a lot I ate!—Didn't you see me frown?"

The young sensualist was in an ecstasy of gratitude to his late refection, and the slightest word recalled him to it. Richard answered him—

"Yes; and felt your kick. It doesn't matter. Rady's safe, and uncle never blabs."

"Well, my plan is to keep it close. You're never safe if you don't.—I never drank much claret before," Ripton was off again. "Won't I now, though! claret's my wine. You know, it may come out any day, and then we're done for," he rather incongruously appended.

Richard only took up the business-thread of his friend's rambling chatter, and answered—

"You've got nothing to do with it, if we are."

"Haven't I, though! I didn't stick in the box, but I'm an accomplice, that's clear. Besides," added Ripton, "do you think I should leave you to bear it all on your shoulders? I ain't that sort of chap, Ricky, I can tell you."

Sir Austin thought more highly of the boy Thompson. Still it looked a detestable conspiracy, and the altered manner of his son impressed him strangely. He was not the boy of yesterday. To Sir Austin it seemed as if a gulf had suddenly opened between them. The boy had embarked, and was on the waters of life in his own vessel. It was as vain to call him back as to attempt to erase what Time has written with the Judgment Blood! This child, for whom he had prayed nightly in such a fervour and humbleness to God, the dangers were about him, the temptations thick on him, and the devil on board piloting. If a day had done so much, what would years do? Were prayers and all the watchfulness he had expended of no avail?

A sensation of infinite melancholy overcame the poor gentleman—a thought that he was fighting with a fate in this beloved boy.

He was half disposed to arrest the two conspirators on the spot, and make them confess, and absolve themselves; but it seemed to him better to keep an unseen eye over his son: Sir Austin's old system prevailed.

Adrian characterized this system well, in saying that Sir Austin wished to be Providence to his son.

If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to another. Alas! love, divine as it is, can do no more than lighten the house it inhabits—must take its shape, sometimes intensify its narrowness—can spiritualize, but not expel, the old life-long lodgers above-stairs and below.

Sir Austin decided to continue quiescent.

The valley still lay black beneath the large autumnal stars, and the exclamations of the boys were becoming fevered and impatient. By-and-by one insisted that he had seen a twinkle. The direction he gave was out of their anticipations. Again the twinkle was announced. Both boys started to their feet. It was a twinkle in the right direction now.

"He's done it!" cried Richard, in great heat. "Now you may say old Blaize'll soon be old Blazes, Rip. I hope he's asleep."

"I'm sure he's snoring!—Look there! He's alight fast enough. He's dry. He'll burn.—I say," Ripton re-assumed the serious intonation, "do you think they'll ever suspect us?"

"What if they do? We must brunt it."

"Of course we will. But, I say! I wish you hadn't given them the scent, though. I like to look innocent. I can't when I know people suspect me. Lord! look there! Isn't it just beginning to flare up!"

The farmer's grounds were indeed gradually standing out in sombre shadows.

"I'll fetch my telescope," said Richard. Ripton, somehow not liking to be left alone, caught hold of him.

"No; don't go and lose the best of it. Here, I'll throw open the window, and we can see."

The window was flung open, and the boys instantly stretched half their bodies out of it; Ripton appearing to devour the rising flames with his mouth: Richard with his eyes.

Opaque and statuesque stood the figure of the baronet behind them. The wind was low. Dense masses of smoke hung amid the darting snakes of fire, and a red malign light was on the neighbouring leafage. No figures could be seen. Apparently the flames had nothing to contend against, for they were making terrible strides into the darkness.

"Oh!" shouted Richard, overcome by excitement, "if I had my telescope! We must have it! Let me go and fetch it! I will!"

The boys struggled together, and Sir Austin stepped back. As he did so, a cry was heard in the passage. He hurried out, closed the chamber, and came upon little Clare lying senseless along the floor.

CHAPTER V

ADRIAN PLIES HIS HOOK

In the morning that followed this night, great gossip was interchanged between Raynham and Lobourne. The village told how Farmer Blaize, of Belthorpe Farm, had his rick feloniously set fire to; his stables had caught fire, himself had been all but roasted alive in the attempt to rescue his cattle, of which numbers had perished in the flames. Raynham counterbalanced arson with an authentic ghost seen by Miss Clare in the left wing of the Abbey—the ghost of a lady, dressed in deep mourning, a scar on her forehead, and a bloody handkerchief at her breast, frightful to behold! and no wonder the child was frightened out of her wits, and lay in a desperate State awaiting the arrival of the London doctors. It was added that the servants had all threatened to leave in a body, and that Sir Austin to appease them had promised to pull down the entire left wing, like a gentleman; for no decent creature, said Lobourne, could consent to live in a haunted house.