CHAPTER I

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; thenceforth 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. Dialer possessed

undoubted fluency, but did tittle, 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 demeanor, 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 nursemaid 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 neat 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 candles 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. Doris Foray 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.