CHAPTER X

AN EXPEDITION

I wondered audibly where the Bench was when Temple and I sat together

alone at Squire Gregory's breakfast-table next morning, very thirsty for

tea. He said it was a place in London, but did not add the sort of place,

only that I should soon be coming to London with him; and I remarked,

'Shall I?' and smiled at him, as if in a fit of careless affection. Then

he talked runningly of the theatres and pantomimes and London's charms.

The fear I had of this Bench made me passingly conscious of Temple's

delicacy in not repeating its name, though why I feared it there was

nothing to tell me. I must have dreamed of it just before waking, and I

burned for reasonable information concerning it. Temple respected my

father too much to speak out the extent of his knowledge on the subject,

so we drank our tea with the grandeur of London for our theme, where,

Temple assured me, you never had a headache after a carouse overnight: a

communication that led me to think the country a far less favourable

place of abode for gentlemen. We quitted the house without seeing our

host or the captain, and greatly admired by the footmen, the maids, and

the grooms for having drunk their masters under the table, which it could

not be doubted that we had done, as Temple modestly observed while we

sauntered off the grounds under the eyes of the establishment. We had

done it fairly, too, with none of those Jack the Giant-Killer tricks my

grandfather accused us of.

The squire would not, and he could not, believe our story until he heard

the confession from the mouth of the captain. After that he said we were

men and heroes, and he tipped us both, much to Janet Ilchester's

advantage, for the squire was a royal giver, and Temple's money had

already begun to take the same road as mine.

Temple, in fact, was falling desperately in love; for this reason he

shrank from quitting Riversley. I perceived it as clearly as a thing seen

through a windowpane. He was always meditating upon dogs, and what might

be the price of this dog or that, and whether lapdogs were good

travellers. The fashionable value of pugs filled him with a sort of

despair. 'My goodness!' he used an exclamation more suitable to women,

'forty or fifty pounds you say one costs, Richie?'

I pretended to estimate the probable cost of one. 'Yes, about that; but

I'll buy you one, one day or other, Temple.'

The dear little fellow coloured hot; he was too much in earnest to laugh

at the absurdity of his being supposed to want a pug for himself, and

walked round me, throwing himself into attitudes with shrugs and loud

breathings. 'I don't . . . don't think that I . . . I care for nothing

but Newfoundlands and mastiffs,' said he. He went on shrugging and

kicking up his heels.

'Girls like pugs,' I remarked.

'I fancy they do,' said Temple, with a snort of indifference.

Then I suggested, 'A pocket-knife for the hunting-field is a very good

thing.'

'Do you think so?' was Temple's rejoinder, and I saw he was dreadfully

afraid of my speaking the person's name for whom it would be such a very

good thing.

'You can get one for thirty shillings. We'll get one when we're in

London. They're just as useful for women as they are for us, you know.'

'Why, of course they are, if they hunt,' said Temple.

'And we mustn't lose time,' I drew him to the point I had at heart, 'for

hunting 'll soon be over. It 's February, mind!'

'Oh, lots of time!' Temple cried out, and on every occasion when I tried

to make him understand that I was bursting to visit London, he kept

evading me, simply because he hated saying good-bye to Janet Ilchester.

His dulness of apprehension in not perceiving that I could not commit a

breach of hospitality by begging him downright to start, struck me as

extraordinary. And I was so acute. I saw every single idea in his head,

every shift of, his mind, and how he half knew that he profited by my

shunning to say flatly I desired to set out upon the discovery of the

Bench. He took the benefit of my shamefacedness, for which I daily

punished his. I really felt that I was justified in giving my

irritability an airing by curious allusions to Janet; yet, though I made

him wince, it was impossible to touch his conscience. He admitted to

having repeatedly spoken of London's charms, and 'Oh, yes! you and I'll

go back together, Richie,' and saying that satisfied him: he doubled our

engagements with Janet that afternoon, and it was a riding party, a

dancing-party, and a drawing of a pond for carp, and we over to Janet,

and Janet over to us, until I grew so sick of her I was incapable of

summoning a spark of jealousy in order the better to torture Temple.

Now, he was a quick-witted boy. Well, I one day heard Janet address my

big dog, Ajax, in the style she usually employed to inform her hearers,

and especially the proprietor, that she coveted a thing: 'Oh, you own

dear precious pet darling beauty! if I might only feed you every day of

my life I should be happy! I curtsey to him every time I see him. If I

were his master, the men should all off hats, and the women all curtsey,

to Emperor Ajax, my dog! my own! my great, dear irresistible love! Then

she nodded at me, 'I would make them, though.' And then at Temple, 'You

see if I wouldn't.'

Ajax was a source of pride to me. However, I heard Temple murmur, in a

tone totally unlike himself, 'He would be a great protection to you'; and

I said to him, 'You know, Temple, I shall be going to London to-morrow or

the next day, not later: I don't know when I shall be back. I wish you

would dispose of the dog just as you like: get him a kind master or

mistress, that's all.'

I sacrificed my dog to bring Temple to his senses. I thought it would

touch him to see how much I could sacrifice just to get an excuse for

begging him to start. He did not even thank me. Ajax soon wore one of

Janet's collars, like two or three other of the Riversley dogs, and I had

the satisfaction of hearing Temple accept my grandfather's invitation for

a further fortnight. And, meanwhile, I was the one who was charged with

going about looking lovelorn! I smothered my feelings and my reflections

on the wisdom of people.

At last my aunt Dorothy found the means of setting me at liberty on the

road to London. We had related to her how Captain Bulsted toasted Julia

Rippenger, and we had both declared in joke that we were sure the captain

wished to be introduced to her. My aunt reserved her ideas on the

subject, but by-and-by she proposed to us to ride over to Julia, and

engage her to come and stay at Riversley for some days. Kissing me, my

aunt said, 'She was my Harry's friend when he was an outcast.'

The words revived my affection for Julia. Strong in the sacred sense of

gratitude, I turned on Temple, reproaching him with selfish forgetfulness

of her good heart and pretty face. Without defending himself, as he might

have done, he entreated me to postpone our journey for a day; he and

Janet had some appointment. Here was given me a noble cause and matter I

need not shrink from speaking of. I lashed Temple in my aunt's presence

with a rod of real eloquence that astonished her, and him, and myself

too; and as he had a sense of guilt not quite explicable in his mind, he

consented to bear what was in reality my burden; for Julia had

distinguished me and not him with all the signs of affection, and of the

two I had the more thoroughly forgotten her; I believe Temple was first

in toasting her at Squire Gregory's table. There is nothing like a

pent-up secret of the heart for accumulating powers of speech; I mean in

youth. The mental distilling process sets in later, and then you have

irony instead of eloquence. From brooding on my father, and not daring to

mention his name lest I should hear evil of it, my thoughts were a proud

family, proud of their origin, proud of their isolation,--and not to be

able to divine them was for the world to confess itself basely beneath

their level. But, when they did pour out, they were tremendous, as Temple

found. This oratorical display of mine gave me an ascendancy over him. He

adored eloquence, not to say grandiloquence: he was the son of a

barrister. 'Let 's go and see her at once, Richie,' he said of Julia. 'I

'm ready to be off as soon as you like; I'm ready to do anything that

will please you'; which was untrue, but it was useless to tell him so. I

sighed at my sad gift of penetration, and tossed the fresh example of it

into the treasury of vanity.

'Temple,' said I, dissembling a little; 'I tell you candidly: you won't

please me by doing anything disagreeable to you. A dog pulled by the

collar is not much of a companion. I start for Julia to-morrow before

daylight. If you like your bed best, stop there; and mind you amuse Janet

for me duing my absence.'

'I'm not going to let any one make comparisons between us,' Temple

muttered.

He dropped dozens of similar remarks, and sometimes talked downright

flattery, I had so deeply impressed him.

We breakfasted by candle-light, and rode away on a frosty foggy morning,

keeping our groom fifty yards to the rear, a laughable sight, with both

his coat-pockets bulging, a couple of Riversley turnover pasties in one,

and a bottle of champagne in the other, for our lunch on the road. Now

and then, when near him, we galloped for the fun of seeing him nurse the

bottle-pocket. He was generally invisible. Temple did not think it

strange that we should be riding out in an unknown world with only a

little ring, half a stone's-throw clear around us, and blots of copse,

and queer vanishing cottages, and hard grey meadows, fir-trees

wonderfully magnified, and larches and birches rigged like fairy ships,

all starting up to us as we passed, and melting instantly. One could have

fancied the fir-trees black torches. And here the shoulder of a hill

invited us to race up to the ridge: some way on we came to crossroads,

careless of our luck in hitting the right one: yonder hung a village

church in the air, and church-steeple piercing ever so high; and out of

the heart of the mist leaped a brook, and to hear it at one moment, and

then to have the sharp freezing silence in one's ear, was piercingly

weird. It all tossed the mind in my head like hay on a pitchfork. I

forgot the existence of everything but what I loved passionately,--and

that had no shape, was like a wind.

Up on a knoll of firs in the middle of a heath, glowing rosy in the

frost, we dismounted to lunch, leaning against the warm saddles, Temple

and I, and Uberly, our groom, who reminded me of a certain tramp of my

acquaintance in his decided preference of beer to champagne; he drank,

though, and sparkled after his draught. No sooner were we on horseback

again--ere the flanks of the dear friendly brutes were in any way

cool--than Temple shouted enthusiastically, 'Richie, we shall do it yet!

I've been funking, but now I'm sure we shall do it. Janet said, "What's

the use of my coming over to dine at Riversley if Harry Richmond and you

don't come home before ten or eleven o'clock?" I told her we'd

do it by dinner-time: Don't you like Janet, Richie?--That is,

if our horses' hic-haec-hocks didn't get strained on this hard

nominative-plural-masculine of the article road. Don't you fancy yourself

dining with the captain, Richie? Dative huic, says old Squire Gregory. I

like to see him at dinner, because he loves the smell of his wine. Oh!

it's nothing to boast of, but we did drink them under the table, it can't

be denied. Janet heard of it. Hulloa! you talk of a hunting-knife. What

do you say to a pair of skates? Here we are in for a frost of six weeks.

It strikes me, a pair of skates . . .'

This was the champagne in Temple. In me it did not bubble to speech, and

I soon drew him on at a pace that rendered conversation impossible.

Uberly shouted after us to spare the horses' legs. We heard him twice out

of the deepening fog. I called to Temple that he was right, we should do

it. Temple hurrahed rather breathlessly. At the end of an hour I pulled

up at an inn, where I left the horses to be groomed and fed, and walked

away rapidly as if I knew the town, Temple following me with perfect

confidence, and, indeed, I had no intention to deceive him. We entered a

new station of a railway.

'Oh!' said Temple, 'the rest of the way by rail.'

When the railway clerk asked me what place I wanted tickets for, London

sprang to my mouth promptly in a murmur, and taking the tickets I replied

to Temple,

'The rest of the way by rail. Uberly's sure to stop at that inn'; but my

heart beat as the carriages slid away with us; an affectionate

commiseration for Temple touched me when I heard him count on our being

back at Riversley in time to dress for dinner.

He laughed aloud at the idea of our plumping down on Rippenger's school,

getting a holiday for the boys, tipping them, and then off with Julia,

exactly like two Gods of the Mythology, Apollo and Mercury.

'I often used to think they had the jolliest lives that ever were lived,'

he said, and trying to catch glimpses of the country, and musing, and

singing, he continued to feel like one of those blissful Gods until

wonder at the passage of time supervened. Amazement, when he looked at my

watch, struck him dumb. Ten minutes later we were in yellow fog, then in

brown. Temple stared at both windows and at me; he jumped from his seat

and fell on it, muttering, 'No; nonsense! I say!' but he had accurately

recognized London's fog. I left him unanswered to bring up all his

senses, which the railway had outstripped, for the contemplation of this

fact, that we two were in the city of London.