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.

Chapter XI

The Great Fog and the Fire at Midnight


It was London city, and the Bench was the kernel of it to me.  I throbbed
with excitement, though I sat looking out of the windows into the
subterranean atmosphere quite still and firm.  When you think long
undividedly of a single object it gathers light, and when you draw near
it in person the strange thing to your mind is the absence of that light;
but I, approaching it in this dense fog, seemed to myself to be only
thinking of it a little more warmly than usual, and instead of fading it
reversed the process, and became, from light, luminous.  Not being able,
however, to imagine the Bench a happy place, I corrected the excess of
brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in the middle
of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping over them in
a sort of mournful family pride.  Then, because I next conceived it a
foreign kind of place, different altogether from that home growth of
ours, the Tower of London, I topped it with a multitude of domes of
pumpkin or turban shape, resembling the Kremlin of Moscow, which had
once leapt up in the eye of Winter, glowing like a million pine-torches,
and flung shadows of stretching red horses on the black smoke-drift.
But what was the Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to this Bench
where my father languished!  There was no comparing them for tragic
horror.  And the Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench was caught
out of sight, hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon breathed; it
might as well be underground.

'Oh!  it's London,' Temple went on, correcting his incorrigible doubts
about it.  He jumped on the platform; we had to call out not to lose one
another.  'I say, Richie, this is London,' he said, linking his arm in
mine: 'you know by the size of the station; and besides, there's the fog.
Oh! it's London.  We've overshot it, we're positively in London.'

I could spare no sympathy for his feelings, and I did not respond to his
inquiring looks.  Now that we were here I certainly wished myself away,
though I would not have retreated, and for awhile I was glad of the
discomforts besetting me; my step was hearty as I led on, meditating upon
asking some one the direction to the Bench presently.  We had to walk,
and it was nothing but traversing on a slippery pavement atmospheric
circles of black brown and brown red, and sometimes a larger circle of
pale yellow; the colours of old bruised fruits, medlars, melons, and the
smell of them; nothing is more desolate.  Neither of us knew where we
were, nor where we were going.  We struggled through an interminable
succession of squalid streets, from the one lamp visible to its neighbour
in the darkness: you might have fancied yourself peering at the head of
an old saint on a smoky canvas; it was like the painting of light rather
than light.  Figures rushed by; we saw no faces.

Temple spoke solemnly: ' Our dinner-hour at home is half-past six.'
A street-boy overheard him and chaffed him.  Temple got the worst of it,
and it did him good, for he had the sweetest nature in the world.  We
declined to be attended by link-boys; they would have hurt our sense of
independence.  Possessed of a sovereign faith that, by dint of
resolution, I should ultimately penetrate to the great square enclosing
the Bench, I walked with the air of one who had the map of London in his
eye and could thread it blindfold.  Temple was thereby deceived into
thinking that I must somehow have learnt the direction I meant to take,
and knew my way, though at the slightest indication of my halting and
glancing round his suspicions began to boil, and he was for asking some
one the name of the ground we stood on: he murmured, 'Fellows get lost in
London.' By this time he clearly understood that I had come to London on
purpose: he could not but be aware of the object of my coming, and I was
too proud, and he still too delicate, to allude to it.

The fog choked us.  Perhaps it took away the sense of hunger by filling
us as if we had eaten a dinner of soot.  We had no craving to eat until
long past the dinner-hour in Temple's house, and then I would rather have
plunged into a bath and a bed than have been requested to sit at a feast;
Temple too, I fancy.  We knew we were astray without speaking of it.
Temple said, 'I wish we hadn't drunk that champagne.' It seemed to me
years since I had tasted the delicious crushing of the sweet bubbles in
my mouth.  But I did not blame them; I was after my father: he, dear
little fellow, had no light ahead except his devotion to me: he must have
had a touch of conscious guilt regarding his recent behaviour, enough to
hold him from complaining formally.  He complained of a London without
shops and lights, wondered how any one could like to come to it in a fog,
and so forth; and again regretted our having drunk champagne in the
morning; a sort of involuntary whimpering easily forgiven to him, for I
knew he had a gallant heart.  I determined, as an act of signal
condescension, to accost the first person we met, male or female, for
Temple's sake.  Having come to this resolve, which was to be an open
confession that I had misled him, wounding to my pride, I hoped eagerly
for the hearing of a footfall.  We were in a labyrinth of dark streets
where no one was astir.  A wretched dog trotted up to us, followed at our
heels a short distance, and left us as if he smelt no luck about us; our
cajoleries were unavailing to keep that miserable companion.

'Sinbad escaped from the, pit by tracking a lynx,' I happened to remark.
Temple would not hear of Sinbad.

'Oh, come, we're not Mussulmen,' said he; 'I declare, Richie, if I saw a
church open, I'd go in and sleep there.  Were you thinking of tracking
the dog, then?  Beer may be had somewhere.  We shall have to find an
hotel.  What can the time be?'

I owed it to him to tell him, so I climbed a lamppost and spelt out the
hour by my watch.  When I descended we were three.  A man had his hands
on Temple's shoulders, examining his features.

'Now speak,' the man said, roughly.

I was interposing, but Temple cried, 'All right, Richie, we are two to
one.'

The man groaned.  I asked him what he wanted.

'My son!  I've lost my son,' the man replied, and walked away; and he
would give no answer to our questions.

I caught hold of the lamp-post, overcome.  I meant to tell Temple, in
response to the consoling touch of his hand, that I hoped the poor, man
would discover his son, but said instead, 'I wish we could see the Bench
to-night.' Temple exclaimed, 'Ah!' pretending by his tone of voice that
we had recently discussed our chance of it, and then he ventured to
inform me that he imagined he had heard of the place being shut up after
a certain hour of the night.

My heart felt released, and gushed with love for him.  'Very well,
Temple,' I said: 'then we'll wait till tomorrow, and strike out for some
hotel now.'

Off we went at a furious pace.  Saddlebank's goose was reverted to by
both of us with an exchange of assurances that we should meet a dish the
fellow to it before we slept.

'As for life,' said I, as soon as the sharp pace had fetched my breathing
to a regular measure, 'adventures are what I call life.'

Temple assented.  'They're capital, if you only see the end of them.'

We talked of Ulysses and Penelope.  Temple blamed him for leaving
Calypso.  I thought Ulysses was right, otherwise we should have had no
slaying of the Suitors but Temple shyly urged that to have a Goddess
caring for you (and she was handsomer than Penelope, who must have been
an oldish woman) was something to make you feel as you do on a hunting
morning, when there are half-a-dozen riding-habits speckling the field--
a whole glorious day your own among them!  This view appeared to me very
captivating, save for an obstruction in my mind, which was, that
Goddesses were always conceived by me as statues.  They talked and they
moved, it was true, but the touch of them was marble; and they smiled and
frowned, but they had no variety they were never warm.

'If I thought that!' muttered Temple, puffing at the raw fog.  He
admitted he had thought just the contrary, and that the cold had
suggested to him the absurdity of leaving a Goddess.

'Look here, Temple,' said I, 'has it never struck you?  I won't say I'm
like him.  It's true I've always admired Ulysses; he could fight best,
talk best, and plough, and box, and how clever he was!  Take him all
round, who wouldn't rather have had him for a father than Achilles?  And
there were just as many women in love with him.'

'More,' said Temple.

'Well, then,' I continued, thanking him in my heart, for it must have
cost him something to let Ulysses be set above Achilles, 'Telemachus is
the one I mean.  He was in search of his father.  He found him at last.
Upon my honour, Temple, when I think of it, I 'm ashamed to have waited
so long.  I call that luxury I've lived in senseless.  Yes!  while I was
uncertain whether my father had enough to eat or not.'

'I say!  hush!' Temple breathed, in pain at such allusions.  'Richie, the
squire has finished his bottle by about now; bottle number two.  He won't
miss us till the morning, but Miss Beltham will.  She'll be at your
bedroom door three or four times in the night, I know.  It's getting
darker and darker, we must be in some dreadful part of London.'

The contrast he presented to my sensations between our pleasant home and
this foggy solitude gave me a pang of dismay.  I diverged from my
favourite straight line, which seemed to pierce into the bowels of the
earth, sharp to the right.  Soon or late after, I cannot tell, we were in
the midst of a thin stream of people, mostly composed of boys and young
women, going at double time, hooting and screaming with the delight of
loosened animals, not quite so agreeably; but animals never hunted on a
better scent.  A dozen turnings in their company brought us in front of a
fire.  There we saw two houses preyed on by the flames, just as if a lion
had his paws on a couple of human creatures, devouring them; we heard his
jaws, the cracking of bones, shrieks, and the voracious in-and-out of his
breath edged with anger.  A girl by my side exclaimed, 'It's not the
Bench, after all!  Would I have run to see a paltry two-story
washerwoman's mangling-shed flare up, when six penn'orth of squibs and
shavings and a cracker make twice the fun!'

I turned to her, hardly able to speak.  'Where 's the Bench, if you
please?'  She pointed.  I looked on an immense high wall.  The blunt
flames of the fire opposite threw a sombre glow on it.

The girl said, 'And don't you go hopping into debt, my young cock-
sparrow, or you'll know one side o' the turnkey better than t' other.'
She had a friend with her who chid her for speaking so freely.

'Is it too late to go in to-night?' I asked.

She answered that it was, and that she and her friend were the persons to
show me the way in there.  Her friend answered more sensibly: 'Yes, you
can't go in there before some time--in the morning.'

I learnt from her that the Bench was a debtors' prison.

The saucy girl of the pair asked me for money.  I handed her a crown-
piece.

'Now won't you give another big bit to my friend?' said she.

I had no change, and the well-mannered girl bade me never mind, the saucy
one pressed for it, and for a treat.  She was amusing in her talk of the
quantity of different fires she had seen; she had also seen accidental-
death corpses, but never a suicide in the act; and here she regretted the
failure of her experiences.  This conversation of a good-looking girl
amazed me.  Presently Temple cried, 'A third house caught, and no engines
yet!  Richie, there's an old woman in her night-dress; we can't stand
by.'

The saucy girl joked at the poor half-naked old woman.  Temple stood
humping and agitating his shoulders like a cat before it springs.  Both
the girls tried to stop us.  The one I liked best seized my watch, and
said, 'Leave this to me to take care of,' and I had no time to wrestle
for it.  I had a glimpse of her face that let me think she was not
fooling me, the watch-chain flew off my neck, Temple and I clove through
the crowd of gapers.  We got into the heat, which was in a minute
scorching.  Three men were under the window; they had sung out to the old
woman above to drop a blanket--she tossed them a water-jug.  She was
saved by the blanket of a neighbour.  Temple and I strained at one corner
of it to catch her.

She came down, the men said, like a singed turkey.  The flames
illuminated her as she descended.  There was a great deal of laughter in
the crowd, but I was shocked.  Temple shared the painful impression
produced on me.  I cannot express my relief when the old woman was
wrapped in the blanket which had broken her descent, and stood like a
blot instead of a figure.  I handed a sovereign to the three men,
complimenting them on the humanity of their dispositions.  They cheered
us, and the crowd echoed the cheer, and Temple and I made our way back to
the two girls: both of us lost our pocket-handkerchiefs, and Temple a
penknife as well.  Then the engines arrived and soused the burning
houses.  We were all in a crimson mist, boys smoking, girls laughing and
staring, men hallooing, hats and caps flying about, fights going on,
people throwing their furniture out of the windows.  The great wall of
the Bench was awful in its reflection of the labouring flames--it rose
out of sight like the flame-tops till the columns of water brought them
down.  I thought of my father, and of my watch.  The two girls were not
visible.  'A glorious life a fireman's!' said Temple.

The firemen were on the roofs of the houses, handsome as Greek heroes,
and it really did look as if they were engaged in slaying an enormous
dragon, that hissed and tongued at them, and writhed its tail, paddling
its broken big red wings in the pit of wreck and smoke, twisting and
darkening-something fine to conquer, I felt with Temple.

A mutual disgust at the inconvenience created by the appropriation of our
pocket-handkerchiefs by members of the crowd, induced us to disentangle
ourselves from it without confiding to any one our perplexity for supper
and a bed.  We were now extremely thirsty.  I had visions of my majority
bottles of Burgundy, lying under John Thresher's care at Dipwell, and
would have abandoned them all for one on the spot.  After ranging about
the outskirts of the crowd, seeking the two girls, we walked away, not so
melancholy but that a draught of porter would have cheered us.  Temple
punned on the loss of my watch, and excused himself for a joke neither of
us had spirit to laugh at.  Just as I was saying, with a last glance at
the fire, 'Anyhow, it would have gone in that crowd,' the nice good girl
ran up behind us, crying, 'There!' as she put the watch-chain over my
head.

'There, Temple,' said I, 'didn't I tell you so?' and Temple kindly
supposed so.

The girl said, 'I was afraid I'd missed you, little fellow, and you'd
take me for a thief, and thank God, I'm no thief yet.  I rushed into the
crowd to meet you after you caught that old creature, and I could have
kissed you both, you're so brave.'

'We always go in for it together,' said Temple.

I made an offer to the girl of a piece of gold.  'Oh, I'm poor,' she
cried, yet kept her hand off it like a bird alighting on ground, not on
prey.  When I compelled her to feel the money tight, she sighed, 'If I
wasn't so poor!  I don't want your gold.  Why are you out so late?'

We informed her of our arrival from the country, and wanderings in the
fog.

'And you'll say you're not tired, I know,' the girl remarked, and laughed
to hear how correctly she had judged of our temper.  Our thirst and
hunger, however, filled her with concern, because of our not being used
to it as she was, and no place was open to supply our wants.  Her friend,
the saucy one, accompanied by a man evidently a sailor, joined us, and
the three had a consultation away from Temple and me, at the end of which
the sailor, whose name was Joe, raised his leg dancingly, and smacked it.
We gave him our hands to shake, and understood, without astonishment,
that we were invited on, board his ship to partake of refreshment.  We
should not have been astonished had he said on board his balloon.  Down
through thick fog of a lighter colour, we made our way to a narrow lane
leading to the river-side, where two men stood thumping their arms across
their breasts, smoking pipes, and swearing.  We entered a boat and were
rowed to a ship.  I was not aware how frozen and befogged my mind and
senses had become until I had taken a desperate and long gulp of smoking
rum-and-water, and then the whole of our adventures from morning to
midnight, with the fir-trees in the country fog, and the lamps in the
London fog, and the man who had lost his son, the fire, the Bench, the
old woman with her fowl-like cry and limbs in the air, and the row over
the misty river, swam flashing before my eyes, and I cried out to the two
girls, who were drinking out of one glass with the sailor Joe, my
entertainer, 'Well, I'm awake now!' and slept straight off the next
instant.

Chapter XII

We find Ourselves Bound on a Voyage


It seemed to me that I had but taken a turn from right to left, or gone
round a wheel, when I repeated the same words, and I heard Temple
somewhere near me mumble something like them.  He drew a long breath, so
did I: we cleared our throats with a sort of whinny simultaneously.  The
enjoyment of lying perfectly still, refreshed, incurious, unexcited, yet
having our minds animated, excursive, reaping all the incidents of our
lives at leisure, and making a dream of our latest experiences, kept us
tranquil and incommunicative.  Occasionally we let fall a sigh fathoms
deep, then by-and-by began blowing a bit of a wanton laugh at the end of
it.  I raised my foot and saw the boot on it, which accounted for an
uneasy sensation setting in through my frame.

I said softly, 'What a pleasure it must be for horses to be groomed!'

'Just what I was thinking!  ' said Temple.

We started up on our elbows, and one or the other cried:

'There's a chart!  These are bunks!  Hark at the row overhead!  We're in
a ship!  The ship's moving!  Is it foggy this morning?  It's time to get
up!  I've slept in my clothes!  Oh, for a dip!  How I smell of smoke!
What a noise of a steamer!  And the squire at Riversley!  Fancy Uberly's
tale!'

Temple, with averted face, asked me whether I meant to return to
Riversley that day.  I assured him I would, on my honour, if possible;
and of course he also would have to return there.  'Why, you've an
appointment with Janet Ilchester,' said I, 'and we may find a pug; we'll
buy the hunting-knife and the skates.  And she shall know you saved an
old woman's life.'

'No, don't talk about that,' Temple entreated me, biting his lip.
'Richie, we're going fast through the water.  It reminds me of breakfast.
I should guess the hour to be nine A.M.'

My watch was unable to assist us; the hands pointed to half-past four,
and were fixed.  We ran up on deck.  Looking over the stern of the
vessel, across a line of rippling eddying red gold, we saw the sun low
upon cushions of beautiful cloud; no trace of fog anywhere; blue sky
overhead, and a mild breeze blowing.

'Sunrise,' I said.

Temple answered, 'Yes,' most uncertainly.

We looked round.  A steam-tug was towing our ship out toward banks of
red-reflecting cloud, and a smell of sea air.

'Why, that's the East there!' cried Temple.  We faced about to the sun,
and behold, he was actually sinking!

'Nonsense!' we exclaimed in a breath.  From seaward to this stupefying
sunset we stood staring.  The river stretched to broad lengths; gulls
were on the grey water, knots of seaweed, and the sea-foam curled in
advance of us.

'By jingo!' Temple spoke out, musing, 'here's a whole day struck out of
our existence.'

'It can't be!' said I, for that any sensible being could be tricked of a
piece of his life in that manner I thought a preposterous notion.

But the sight of a lessening windmill in the West, shadows eastward, the
wide water, and the air now full salt, convinced me we two had slept
through an entire day, and were passing rapidly out of hail of our native
land.

'We must get these fellows to put us on shore at once,' said Temple: 'we
won't stop to eat.  There's a town; a boat will row us there in half-an-
hour.  Then we can wash, too.  I've got an idea nothing's clean here.
And confound these fellows for not having the civility to tell us they
were going to start!'

We were rather angry, a little amused, not in the least alarmed at our
position.  A sailor, to whom we applied for an introduction to the
captain, said he was busy.  Another gave us a similar reply, with a
monstrous grimace which was beyond our comprehension.  The sailor Joe was
nowhere to be seen.  None of the sailors appeared willing to listen to
us, though they stopped as they were running by to lend half an ear to
what we had to say.  Some particular movement was going on in the ship.
Temple was the first to observe that the steamtug was casting us loose,
and cried he, 'She'll take us on board and back to London Bridge.  Let's
hail her.' He sang out, ' Whoop!  ahoy!' I meanwhile had caught sight of
Joe.

'Well, young gentleman!' he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well.
My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on board,
only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity.  'You're such a deuce of
a sleeper,' he said.  'You see, we had to be off early to make up for
forty hours lost by that there fog.  I tried to wake you both; no good;.
so I let you snore away.  We took up our captain mid-way down the river,
and now you're in his hands, and he'll do what he likes with you, and
that 's a fact, and my opinion is you 'll see a foreign shore before
you're in the arms of your family again.'

At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse,
transported into the bargain.

I insisted on seeing the captain.  A big bright round moon was dancing
over the vessel's bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping into
the distance, and the land receding, gave me--coming on my wrath--
suffocating emotions.

No difficulties were presented in my way.  I was led up to a broad man in
a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his eyebrows as
if he were always making head against a gale.  He nodded to my respectful
salute.  'Cabin,' he said, and turned his back to me.

I addressed him, 'Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain.  I must and
will go!  I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked me
here.  I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won't be detained.'

Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a
school-slate for geography and Euclid's propositions.

'Cabin, cabin,' the captain repeated.

I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face,
since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he occupied
the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and boxes, and it
would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when by another right-
about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at the blank space
between his shoulders.

Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I bade
him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it was, and
beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready for
hostilities.  I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to the
cabin.  'Captain Jasper Welsh,' he was reiterating, as if sounding it to
discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain's name, that
he had learnt from one of the seamen.

Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the
words came: 'A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the vicinity
of the city of Bristol.'

This set Temple off laughing: 'And so he bought a ship and had traps laid
down to catch young fellows for ransom.'

I was obliged to request Temple not to joke, but the next moment I had
launched Captain Jasper Welsh on a piratical exploit; Temple lifted the
veil from his history, revealing him amid the excesses of a cannibal
feast.  I dragged him before a British jury; Temple hanged him in view of
an excited multitude.  As he boasted that there was the end of Captain
Welsh, I broke the rope.  But Temple spoiled my triumph by depriving him
of the use of his lower limbs after the fall, for he was a heavy man.  I
could not contradict it, and therefore pitched all his ship's crew upon
the gallows in a rescue.  Temple allowed him to be carried off by his
faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain was never after able
to release his neck from the hangman's slip knot.  The consequence was
that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for concealment by day,
and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his wife said she was a
deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.

The talking of even such nonsense as this was a relief to us in our
impatience and helplessness, with the lights of land heaving far distant
to our fretful sight through the cabin windows.

When we had to talk reasonably we were not so successful.  Captain Welsh
was one of those men who show you, whether you care to see them or not,
all the processes by which they arrive at an idea of you, upon which they
forthwith shape their course.  Thus, when he came to us in the cabin, he
took the oil-lamp in his hand and examined our faces by its light; he had
no reply to our remonstrances and petitions: all he said was, 'Humph!
well, I suppose you're both gentlemen born'; and he insisted on
prosecuting his scrutiny without any reference to the tenour of our
observations.

We entreated him half imperiously to bring his ship to and put us on
shore in a boat.  He bunched up his mouth, remarking, 'Know their
grammar: habit o' speaking to grooms, eh? humph.' We offered to pay
largely.  'Loose o' their cash,' was his comment, and so on; and he was
the more exasperating to us because he did not look an evil-minded man;
only he appeared to be cursed with an evil opinion of us.  I tried to
remove it; I spoke forbearingly.  Temple, imitating me, was sugar-sweet.
We exonerated the captain from blame, excused him for his error, named
the case a mistake on both sides.  That long sleep of ours, we said, was
really something laughable; we laughed at the recollection of it, a
lamentable piece of merriment.

Our artfulness and patience becoming exhausted, for the captain had
vouchsafed us no direct answer, I said at last, 'Captain Welsh, here we
are on board your ship will you tell us what you mean to do with us?'

He now said bluntly, ' I will.'

'You'll behave like a man of honour,' said I, and to that he cried
vehemently, 'I will.'

'Well, then,' said I, 'call out the boat, if you please; we're anxious to
be home.'

'So you shall!' the captain shouted, 'and per ship--my barque Priscilla;
and better men than you left, or I 'm no Christian.'

Temple said briskly, 'Thank you, captain.'

'You may wait awhile with that, my lad,' he answered; and, to our
astonishment, recommended us to go and clean our faces and prepare to
drink some tea at his table.

'Thank you very much, captain, we'll do that when we 're on shore,' said
we.

'You'll have black figure-heads and empty gizzards, then, by that time,'
he remarked.  We beheld him turning over the leaves of a Bible.

Now, this sight of the Bible gave me a sense of personal security, and a
notion of hypocrisy in his conduct as well; and perceiving that we had
conjectured falsely as to his meaning to cast us on shore per ship, his
barque Priscilla, I burst out in great heat, 'What!  we are prisoners?
You dare to detain us?'

Temple chimed in, in a similar strain.  Fairly enraged, we flung at him
without anything of what I thought eloquence.

The captain ruminated up and down the columns of his Bible.

I was stung to feel that we were like two small terriers baiting a huge
mild bull.  At last he said, 'The story of the Prodigal Son.'

'Oh!' groaned Temple, at the mention of this worn-out old fellow, who has
gone in harness to tracts ever since he ate the fatted calf.

But the captain never heeded his interruption.

'Young gentlemen, I've finished it while you 've been barking at me.  If
I 'd had him early in life on board my vessel, I hope I'm not
presumptuous in saying--the Lord forgive me if I be so!--I'd have stopped
his downward career--ay, so!--with a trip in the right direction.  The
Lord, young gentlemen, has not thrown you into my hands for no purpose
whatsoever.  Thank him on your knees to-night, and thank Joseph Double,
my mate, when you rise, for he was the instrument of saving you from bad
company.  If this was a vessel where you 'd hear an oath or smell the
smell of liquor, I 'd have let you run when there was terra firma within
stone's throw.  I came on board, I found you both asleep, with those
marks of dissipation round your eyes, and I swore--in the Lord's name,
mind you--I'd help pluck you out of the pit while you had none but one
leg in.  It's said!  It's no use barking.  I am not to be roused.  The
devil in me is chained by the waist, and a twenty-pound weight on his
tongue.  With your assistance I'll do the same for the devil in you.
Since you've had plenty of sleep, I 'll trouble you to commit to memory
the whole story of the Prodigal Son 'twixt now and morrow's sunrise.
We 'll have our commentary on it after labour done.  Labour you will in
my vessel, for your soul's health.  And let me advise you not to talk;
in your situation talking's temptation to lying.  You'll do me the
obligation to feed at my table.  And when I hand you back to your
parents, why, they'll thank me, if you won't.  But it's not thanks I look
for: it's my bounden Christian duty I look to.  I reckon a couple o'
stray lambs equal to one lost sheep.'

The captain uplifted his arm, ejaculating solemnly, 'By!' and faltered.
'You were going to swear!' said Temple, with savage disdain.

'By the blessing of Omnipotence!  I'll save a pair o' pups from turning
wolves.  And I'm a weak mortal man, that 's too true.'

'He was going to swear,' Temple muttered to me.

I considered the detection of Captain Welsh's hypocrisy unnecessary,
almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was
boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of eloquence
with which I was big.  Soon after, I was trying to bribe the man with all
my money and my watch.

'Who gave you that watch?' said he.

'Downright Church catechism!' muttered Temple.

'My grandfather,' said I.

The captain's head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something
indescribable.

'My grandfather,' I continued, 'will pay you handsomely for any service
you do to me and my friend.'

'Now, that's not far off forgoing,' said the captain, in a tone as much
as to say we were bad all over.

I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows.  My desolation, my
humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together.  Out it came--

'Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent
it.  Our relatives will be miserable about us.  They--captain!--they
don't know where we are.  We haven't even a change of clothes.  Of course
we know we're at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man.  You shall
be paid or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we shall
be eternally grateful to you.  Of course you mean kindly to us; we see
that--'

'I thank the Lord for it!' he interposed.

'Only you really are under a delusion.  It 's extraordinary.  You can't
be quite in your right senses about us; you must be--I don't mean to
speak disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us.  .  .  .

'Doddered, don't they say in one of the shires?' he remarked.

Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I
appealed to his manliness.  Why should he take advantage of a couple of
boys?  I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery
were not our friends suffering now.  ('Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean
in time to come!' he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic
dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.

'Is that Latin or Greek?' he asked.

I would not reply to the cold-blooded question.  He said the New
Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could
read it in the original.

'Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?' said Temple,
an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the point
than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so; however, I took
it up:--

'How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on board
your vessel?  Tell us that.'

He played thumb and knuckles on his table.  Just when I was hoping that
good would come of the senseless tune, Temple cried,

'Tell us what your exact intentions are, Captain Welsh.  What do you mean
to do with us?'

'Mean to take you the voyage out and the voyage home, Providence
willing,' said the captain, and he rose.

We declined his offer of tea, though I fancy we could have gnawed at a
bone.

'There's no compulsion in that matter,' he said.  'You share my cabin
while you're my guests, shipmates, and apprentices in the path of living;
my cabin and my substance, the same as if you were what the North-
countrymen call bairns o' mine: I've none o' my own.  My wife was a
barren woman.  I've none but my old mother at home.  Have your sulks out,
lads; you'll come round like the Priscilla on a tack, and discover you've
made way by it.'

We quitted his cabin, bowing stiffly.

Temple declared old Rippenger was better than this canting rascal.

The sea was around us, a distant yellow twinkle telling of land.

'His wife a barren woman!  what's that to us!' Temple went on, exploding
at intervals.  'So was Sarah.  His cabin and his substance!  He talks
more like a preacher than a sailor.  I should like to see him in a storm!
He's no sailor at all.  His men hate him.  It wouldn't be difficult to
get up a mutiny on board this ship.  Richie, I understand the whole plot:
he's in want of cabin-boys.  The fellow has impressed us.  We shall have
to serve till we touch land.  Thank God, there's a British consul
everywhere; I say that seriously.  I love my country; may she always be
powerful!  My life is always at her---- Did you feel that pitch of the
ship?  Of all the names ever given to a vessel, I do think Priscilla is
without exception the most utterly detestable.  Oh! there again.  No,
it'll be too bad, Richie, if we 're beaten in this way.'

'If YOU are beaten,' said I, scarcely venturing to speak lest I should
cry or be sick.

We both felt that the vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect.
I set my head to think as hard as possible on Latin verses (my instinct
must have drawn me to them as to a species of intellectual biscuit
steeped in spirit, tough, and comforting, and fundamentally opposed to
existing circumstances, otherwise I cannot account for the attraction).
They helped me for a time; they kept off self-pity, and kept the
machinery of the mind at work.  They lifted me, as it were, to an upper
floor removed from the treacherously sighing Priscilla.  But I came down
quickly with a crash; no dexterous management of my mental resources
could save me from the hemp-like smell of the ship, nor would leaning
over the taffrail, nor lying curled under a tarpaulin.  The sailors
heaped pilot-coats upon us.  It was a bad ship, they said, to be sick on
board of, for no such thing as brandy was allowed in the old Priscilla.
Still I am sure I tasted some before I fell into a state of semi-
insensibility.  As in a trance I heard Temple's moans, and the captain's
voice across the gusty wind, and the forlorn crunching of the ship down
great waves.  The captain's figure was sometimes stooping over us, more
great-coats were piled on us; sometimes the wind whistled thinner than
one fancies the shrieks of creatures dead of starvation and restless,
that spend their souls in a shriek as long as they can hold it on, say
nursery-maids; the ship made a truce with the waters and grunted; we took
two or three playful blows, we were drenched with spray, uphill we
laboured, we caught the moon in a net of rigging, away we plunged; we
mounted to plunge again and again.  I reproached the vessel in argument
for some imaginary inconsistency.  Memory was like a heavy barrel on my
breast, rolling with the sea.

Chapter XIII

We Conduct Several Learned Arguments with the Captain of the Priscilla


Captain Welsh soon conquered us.  The latest meal we had eaten was on the
frosty common under the fir-trees.  After a tremendous fast, with sea-
sickness supervening, the eggs and bacon, and pleasant benevolent-
smelling tea on the captain's table were things not to be resisted by two
healthy boys who had previously stripped and faced buckets of maddening
ice-cold salt-water, dashed at us by a jolly sailor.  An open mind for
new impressions came with the warmth of our clothes.  We ate, bearing
within us the souls of injured innocents; nevertheless, we were thankful,
and, to the captain's grace, a long one, we bowed heads decently.  It was
a glorious breakfast, for which land and sea had prepared us in about
equal degrees: I confess, my feelings when I jumped out of the cabin were
almost those of one born afresh to life and understanding.  Temple and I
took counsel.  We agreed that sulking would be ridiculous, unmanly,
ungentlemanly.  The captain had us fast, as if we were under a lion's
paw; he was evidently a well-meaning man, a fanatic deluded concerning
our characters: the barque Priscilla was bound for a German port, and
should arrive there in a few days,--why not run the voyage merrily since
we were treated with kindness?  Neither the squire nor Temple's father
could complain of our conduct; we were simply victims of an error that
was assisting us to a knowledge of the world, a youth's proper ambition.
'And we're not going to be starved,' said Temple.

I smiled, thinking I perceived the reason why I had failed in my oration
over-night; so I determined that on no future occasion would I let pride
stand in the way of provender.  Breakfast had completely transformed us
We held it due to ourselves that we should demand explanations from
Joseph Double, the mate, and then, after hearing him, furnish them with a
cordial alacrity to which we might have attached unlimited credence had
he not protested against our dreaming him to have supplied hot rum-and-
water on board, we wrote our names and addresses in the captain's log-
book, and immediately asked permission to go to the mast-head.

He laughed.  Out of his cabin there was no smack of the preacher in him.
His men said he was a stout seaman, mad on the subject of grog and girls.
Why, it was on account of grog and girls that he was giving us this dish
of salt-water to purify us!  Grog and girls!  cried we.  We vowed upon
our honour as gentlemen we had tasted grog for the first time in our
lives on board the Priscilla.  How about the girls?  they asked.  We
informed them we knew none but girls who were ladies.  Thereupon one
sailor nodded, one sent up a crow, one said the misfortune of the case
lay in all girls being such precious fine ladies; and one spoke in
dreadfully blank language, he accused us of treating the Priscilla as a
tavern for the entertainment of bad company, stating that he had helped
to row me and my associates from the shore to the ship.

'Poor Mr. Double!' says he; 'there was only one way for him to jump you
two young gentlemen out o' that snapdragon bowl you was in--or quashmire,
call it; so he 'ticed you on board wi' the bait you was swallowing, which
was making the devil serve the Lord's turn.  And I'll remember that
night, for I yielded to swearing, and drank too!'  The other sailors
roared with laughter.

I tipped them, not to appear offended by their suspicions.  We thought
them all hypocrites, and were as much in error as if we had thought them
all honest.

Things went fairly well with the exception of the lessons in Scripture.
Our work was mere playing at sailoring, helping furl sails, haul ropes,
study charts, carry messages, and such like.  Temple made his voice
shrewdly emphatic to explain to the captain that we liked the work, but
that such lessons as these out of Scripture were what the eeriest
youngsters were crammed with.

'Such lessons as these, maybe, don't have the meaning on land they get to
have on the high seas,' replied the captain: 'and those youngsters you
talk of were not called in to throw a light on passages: for I may teach
you ship's business aboard my barque, but we're all children inside the
Book.'

He groaned heartily to hear that our learning lay in the direction of
Pagan Gods and Goddesses, and heathen historians and poets; adding, it
was not new to him, and perhaps that was why the world was as it was.
Nor did he wonder, he said, at our running from studies of those filthy
writings loose upon London; it was as natural as dunghill steam.  Temple
pretended he was forced by the captain's undue severity to defend Venus;
he said, I thought rather wittily, 'Sailors ought to have a respect for
her, for she was born in the middle of the sea, and she steered straight
for land, so she must have had a pretty good idea of navigation.'

But the captain answered none the less keenly, 'She had her idea of
navigating, as the devil of mischief always has, in the direction where
there's most to corrupt; and, my lad, she teaches the navigation that
leads to the bottom beneath us.'

He might be right, still our mien was evil in reciting the lessons from
Scripture; and though Captain Welsh had intelligence we could not draw
into it the how and the why of the indignity we experienced.  We had
rather he had been a savage captain, to have braced our spirits to sturdy
resistance, instead of a mild, good-humoured man of kind intentions, who
lent us his linen to wear, fed us at his table, and taxed our most
gentlemanly feelings to find excuses for him.  Our way of revenging
ourselves becomingly was to laud the heroes of antiquity, as if they had
possession of our souls and touched the fountain of worship.  Whenever
Captain Welsh exclaimed, 'Well done,' or the equivalent, 'That 's an
idea,' we referred him to Plutarch for our great exemplar.  It was
Alcibiades gracefully consuming his black broth that won the captain's
thanks for theological acuteness, or the young Telemachus suiting his
temper to the dolphin's moods, since he must somehow get on shore on the
dolphin's back.  Captain Welsh could not perceive in Temple the
personifier of Alcibiades, nor Telemachus in me; but he was aware of an
obstinate obstruction behind our compliance.  This he called the devil
coiled like a snake in its winter sleep.  He hurled texts at it openly,
or slyly dropped a particularly heavy one, in the hope of surprising it
with a death-blow.  We beheld him poring over his Bible for texts that
should be sovereign medicines for us, deadly for the devil within us.
Consequently, we were on the defensive: bits of Cicero, bits of Seneca,
soundly and nobly moral, did service on behalf of Paganism; we remembered
them certainly almost as if an imp had brought them from afar.  Nor had
we any desire to be in opposition to the cause he supported.  What we
were opposed to was the dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man,
who had his one specific for everything, and saw mortal sickness in all
other remedies or recreations.  Temple said to him,

'If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to tell me Greek and Latin authors
are bad for me, I should listen to his remarks, because he 's a scholar:
he knows the languages and knows what they contain.'

Captain Welsh replied,

'If the Archbishop o' Canterbury sailed the sea, and lived in Foul Alley,
Waterside, when on shore, and so felt what it is to toss on top of the
waves o' perdition, he'd understand the value of a big, clean, well-
manned, well-provisioned ship, instead o' your galliots wi' gaudy sails,
your barges that can't rise to a sea, your yachts that run to port like
mother's pets at first pipe o' the storm, your trim-built wherries.'

'So you'd have only one sort of vessel afloat!' said I.  'There's the
difference of a man who's a scholar.'

'I'd have,' said the captain, 'every lad like you, my lad, trained in the
big ship, and he wouldn't capsize, and be found betrayed by his light
timbers as I found you.  Serve your apprenticeship in the Lord's three-
decker; then to command what you may.'

'No, no, Captain Welsh,' says Temple: 'you must grind at Latin and Greek
when you 're a chick, or you won't ever master the rudiments.  Upon my
honour, I declare it 's the truth, you must.  If you'd like to try, and
are of a mind for a go at Greek, we'll do our best to help you through
the aorists.  It looks harder than Latin, but after a start it 's easier.
Only, I'm afraid your three-decker's apprenticeship 'll stand in your
way.'

'Greek 's to be done for me; I can pay clever gentlemen for doing Greek
for me,' said the captain.  'The knowledge and the love of virtue I must
do for myself; and not to be wrecked, I must do it early.'

'Well, that's neither learning nor human nature,' said I.

'It's the knowledge o' the right rules for human nature, my lad.'

'Would you kidnap youngsters to serve in your ship, captain?'

'I'd bless the wind that blew them there, foul or not, my lad.'

'And there they'd stick when you had them, captain?'

'I'd think it was the Lord's will they should stick there awhile,
my lad--yes.'

'And what of their parents?'

'Youngsters out like gossamers on a wind, their parents are where they
sow themselves, my lad.'

'I call that hard on the real parents, Captain Welsh,' said Temple.

'It's harder on Providence when parents breed that kind o' light
creature, my lad.'

We were all getting excited, talking our best, such as it was; the
captain leaning over his side of the table, clasping his hands
unintentionally preacher-like; we on our side supporting our chins on our
fists, quick to be at him.  Temple was brilliant; he wanted to convert
the captain, and avowed it.

'For,' said he, 'you're not like one of those tract-fellows.  You're a
man we can respect, a good seaman, master of your ship, and hearty, and
no mewing sanctimoniousness, and we can see and excuse your mistake as to
us two; but now, there's my father at home--he's a good man, but he 's a
man of the world, and reads his classics and his Bible.  He's none the
worse for it, I assure you.'

'Where was his son the night of the fog?' said the captain.

'Well, he happened to be out in it.'

'Where'd he be now but for one o' my men?'

'Who can answer that, Captain Welsh?'

'I can, my lad-stewing in an ante-room of hell-gates, I verily believe.'

Temple sighed at the captain's infatuation, and said, 'I'll tell you of a
fellow at our school named Drew; he was old Rippenger's best theological
scholar--always got the prize for theology.  Well, he was a confirmed
sneak.  I've taken him into a corner and described the torments of dying
to him, and his look was disgusting--he broke out in a clammy sweat.
"Don't, don't!"  he'd cry.  "You're just the fellow to suffer intensely,"
I told him.  And what was his idea of escaping it?  Why, by learning the
whole of Deuteronomy and the Acts of the Apostles by heart!  His idea of
Judgement Day was old Rippenger's half-yearly examination.  These are
facts, you know, Captain Welsh.'

I testified to them briefly.

The captain said a curious thing: 'I'll make an appointment with you in
leviathan's jaws the night of a storm, my lad.'

'With pleasure,' said Temple.

'The Lord send it!' exclaimed the captain.

His head was bent forward, and he was gazing up into his eyebrows.

Before we knew that anything was coming, he was out on a narrative of a
scholar of one of the Universities.  Our ears were indifferent to the
young man's career from the heights of fortune to delirium tremens down
the cataract of brandy, until the captain spoke of a dark night on the
Pool of the Thames; and here his voice struggled, and we tried hard to
catch the thread of the tale.  Two men and a girl were in the boat.  The
men fought, the girl shrieked, the boat was upset, the three were
drowned.

All this came so suddenly that nothing but the captain's heavy thump of
his fist on the table kept us from laughing.

He was quite unable to relate the tale, and we had to gather it from his
exclamations.  One of the men was mate of a vessel lying in the Pool,
having only cast anchor that evening; the girl was his sweetheart; the
other man had once been a fine young University gentleman, and had become
an outfitter's drunken agent.  The brave sailor had nourished him often
when on shore, and he, with the fluent tongue which his college had
trimmed for him, had led the girl to sin during her lover's absence.
Howsoever, they put off together to welcome him on his arrival, never
suspecting that their secret had been whispered to Robert Welsh
beforehand.  Howsoever, Robert gave them hearty greeting, and down to the
cabin they went, and there sat drinking up to midnight.

'Three lost souls!' said the captain.

'See how they run,' Temple sang, half audibly, and flushed hot, ashamed
of himself.

''Twas I had to bear the news to his mother,' the captain pursued; 'and it
was a task, my lads, for I was then little more than your age, and the
glass was Robert's only fault, and he was my only brother.'

I offered my hand to the captain.  He grasped it powerfully.  'That crew
in a boat, and wouldn't you know the devil'd be coxswain?' he called
loudly, and buried his face.

'No,' he said, looking up at us, 'I pray for no storm, but, by the Lord's
mercy, for a way to your hearts through fire or water.  And now on deck,
my lads, while your beds are made up.  Three blind things we verily are.'

Captain Welsh showed he was sharp of hearing.  His allusion to the
humming of the tune of the mice gave Temple a fit of remorse, and he
apologized.

'Ay,' said the captain, 'it is so; own it: frivolity's the fruit of that
training that's all for the flesh.  But dip you into some o' my books on
my shelves here, and learn to see living man half skeleton, like life and
shadow, and never to living man need you pray forgiveness, my lad.'

By sheer force of character he gained the command of our respect.  Though
we agreed on deck that he had bungled his story, it impressed us; we felt
less able to cope with him, and less willing to encounter a storm.

'We shall have one, of course,' Temple said, affecting resignation, with
a glance aloft.

I was superstitiously of the same opinion, and praised the vessel.

'Oh, Priscilla's the very name of a ship that founders with all hands and
sends a bottle on shore,' said Temple.

'There isn't a bottle on board,' said I; and this piece of nonsense
helped us to sleep off our gloom.

Chapter XIV

I Meet Old Friends


Notwithstanding the prognostications it pleased us to indulge, we had a
tolerably smooth voyage.  On a clear cold Sunday morning we were sailing
between a foreign river's banks, and Temple and I were alternately
reading a chapter out of the Bible to the assembled ship's crew, in
advance of the captain's short exhortation.  We had ceased to look at
ourselves inwardly, and we hardly thought it strange.  But our hearts
beat for a view of the great merchant city, which was called a free city,
and therefore, Temple suggested, must bear certain portions of
resemblance to old England; so we made up our minds to like it.

'A wonderful place for beer cellars,' a sailor observed to us slyly, and
hitched himself up from the breech to the scalp.

At all events, it was a place where we could buy linen.

For that purpose, Captain Welsh handed us over to the care of his trusted
mate Mr. Joseph Double, and we were soon in the streets of the city,
desirous of purchasing half their contents.  My supply of money was not
enough for what I deemed necessary purchases.  Temple had split his
clothes, mine were tarred; we were appearing at a disadvantage, and we
intended to dine at a good hotel and subsequently go to a theatre.  Yet I
had no wish to part with my watch.  Mr. Double said it might be arranged.
It was pawned at a shop for a sum equivalent in our money to about twelve
pounds, and Temple obliged me by taking charge of the ticket.  Thus we
were enabled to dress suitably and dine pleasantly, and, as Mr. Double
remarked, no one could rob me of my gold watch now.  We visited a couple
of beer-cellars to taste the drink of the people, and discovered three of
our men engaged in a similar undertaking.  I proposed that it should be
done at my expense.  They praised their captain, but asked us, as
gentlemen and scholars, whether it was reasonable to object to liquor
because your brother was carried out on a high tide?  Mr. Double
commended them to moderation.  Their reply was to estimate an immoderate
amount of liquor as due to them, with profound composure.

'Those rascals,' Mr. Double informed us, 'are not in the captain's
confidence they're tidy seamen, though, and they submit to the captain's
laws on board and have their liberty ashore.'

We inquired what the difference was between their privileges and his.

'Why,' said he, 'if they're so much as accused of a disobedient act, off
they 're scurried, and lose fair wages and a kind captain.  And let any
man Jack of 'em accuse me, and he bounds a india-rubber ball against a
wall and gets it; all he meant to give he gets.  Once you fix the
confidence of your superior, you're waterproof.'

We held our peace, but we could have spoken.

Mr. Double had no moral hostility toward theatres.  Supposing he did not
relish the performance, he could enjoy a spell in the open air, he said,
and this he speedily decided to do.  Had we not been bound in honour to
remain for him to fetch us, we also should have retired from a
representation of which we understood only the word ja.  It was tiresome
to be perpetually waiting for the return of this word.  We felt somewhat
as dogs must feel when human speech is addressed to them.  Accordingly,
we professed, without concealment, to despise the whole performance.
I reminded Temple of a saying of the Emperor Charles V. as to a knowledge
of languages.

'Hem!' he went critically; 'it's all very well for a German to talk in
that way, but you can't be five times an Englishman if you're a
foreigner.'

We heard English laughter near us.  Presently an English gentleman
accosted us.

'Mr. Villiers, I believe?' He bowed at me.

'My name is Richmond.'

He bowed again, with excuses, talked of the Play, and telegraphed to a
lady sitting in a box fronting us.  I saw that she wrote on a slip of
paper; she beckoned; the gentleman quitted us, and soon after placed a
twisted note in my hand.  It ran:

'Miss Goodwin (whose Christian name is Clara) wishes very much to know
how it has fared with Mr. Harry Richmond since he left Venice.'

I pushed past a number of discontented knees, trying, on my way to her
box, to recollect her vividly, but I could barely recollect her at all,
until I had sat beside her five minutes.  Colonel Goodwin was asleep in a
corner of the box.  Awakened by the sound of his native tongue, he
recognized me immediately.

'On your way to your father?' he said, as he shook my hand.

I thought it amazing he should guess that in Germany.

'Do you know where he is, sir?' I asked.

'We saw him,' replied the colonel; 'when was it, Clara?  A week or ten
days ago.'

'Yes,' said Miss Goodwin; 'we will talk of that by-and-by.' And she
overflowed with comments on my personal appearance, and plied me with
questions, but would answer none of mine.

I fetched Temple into the box to introduce him.  We were introduced in
turn to Captain Malet, the gentleman who had accosted me below.

'You understand German, then?' said Miss Goodwin.

She stared at hearing that we knew only the word ja, for it made our
presence in Germany unaccountable.

'The most dangerous word of all,' said Colonel Goodwin, and begged us
always to repeat after it the negative nein for an antidote.

'You have both seen my father?' I whispered to Miss Goodwin; 'both?  We
have been separated.  Do tell me everything.  Don't look at the stage-
they speak such nonsense.  How did you remember me?  How happy I am to
have met you!  Oh! I haven't forgotten the gondolas and the striped
posts, and stali and the other word; but soon after we were separated,
and I haven't seen him since.'

She touched her father's arm.

'At once, if you like,' said he, jumping up erect.

'In Germany was it?' I persisted.

She nodded gravely and leaned softly on my arm while we marched out of
the theatre to her hotel--I in such a state of happiness underlying
bewilderment and strong expectation that I should have cried out loud had
not pride in my partner restrained me.  At her tea-table I narrated the
whole of my adventure backwards to the time of our parting in Venice,
hurrying it over as quick as I could, with the breathless termination,
'And now?'

They had an incomprehensible reluctance to perform their part of the
implied compact.  Miss Goodwin looked at Captain Malet.  He took his
leave.  Then she said, 'How glad I am you have dropped that odious name
of Roy!  Papa and I have talked of you frequently--latterly very often.
I meant to write to you, Harry Richmond.  I should have done it the
moment we returned to England.'

'You must know,' said the colonel, 'that I am an amateur inspector of
fortresses, and my poor Clara has to trudge the Continent with me to pick
up the latest inventions in artillery and other matters, for which I get
no thanks at head-quarters--but it 's one way of serving one's country
when the steel lies rusting.  We are now for home by way of Paris.  I
hope that you and your friend will give us your company.  I will see this
Captain Welsh of yours before we start.  Clara, you decided on dragging
me to the theatre to-night with your usual admirable instinct.'

I reminded Miss Goodwin of my father being in Germany.

'Yes, he is at one of the Courts, a long distance from here,' she said,
rapidly.  'And you came by accident in a merchant-ship!  You are one of
those who are marked for extraordinary adventures.  Confess: you would
have set eyes on me, and not known me.  It's a miracle that I should meet
my little friend Harry--little no longer my friend all the same, are you
not?'

I hoped so ardently.

She with great urgency added, 'Then come with us.  Prove that you put
faith in our friendship.'

In desperation I exclaimed, 'But I must, I must hear of my father.'

She turned to consult the colonel's face.

'Certainly,' he said, and eulogized a loving son.  'Clara will talk to
you.  I'm for bed.  What was the name of the play we saw this evening?
Oh!  Struensee, to be sure.  We missed the scaffold.'

He wished us good-night on an appointment of the hour for breakfast, and
ordered beds for us in the hotel.

Miss Goodwin commenced: 'But really I have nothing to tell you, or very
little.  You know, Papa has introductions everywhere; we are like
Continental people, and speak a variety of languages, and I am almost a
foreigner, we are so much abroad; but I do think English boys should be
educated at home: I hope you'll go to an English college.'

Noticing my painful look, 'We saw him at the Court of the Prince of
Eppenwelzen,' she said, as if her brows ached.  'He is very kindly
treated there; he was there some weeks ago.  The place lies out in the
Hanover direction, far from here.  He told us that you were with your
grandfather, and I must see Riversley Grange, and the truth is you must
take me there.  I suspect you have your peace to make; perhaps I shall
help you, and be a true Peribanou.  We go over Amsterdam, the Hague,
Brussels, and you shall see the battlefield, Paris, straight to London.
Yes, you are fickle; you have not once called me Peribanou.'

Her voluble rattling succeeded in fencing off my questions before I could
exactly shape them, as I staggered from blind to blind idea, now thinking
of the sombre red Bench, and now of the German prince's Court.

'Won't you tell me any more to-night?' I said, when she paused.

'Indeed, I have not any more to tell,' she assured me.

It was clear to me that she had joined the mysterious league against my
father.  I began to have a choking in the throat.  I thanked her and
wished her good-night while I was still capable of smiling.

At my next interview with Colonel Goodwin he spoke promptly on the
subject of my wanderings.  I was of an age, he said, to know my own
interests.  No doubt filial affection was excellent in its way, but in
fact it was highly questionable whether my father was still at the Court
of this German prince; my father had stated that he meant to visit
England to obtain an interview with his son, and I might miss him by a
harum-scarum chase over Germany.  And besides, was I not offending my
grandfather and my aunt, to whom I owed so much?  He appealed to my
warmest feelings on their behalf.  This was just the moment, he said,
when there was a turning-point in my fortunes.  He could assure me most
earnestly that I should do no good by knocking at this prince's doors,
and have nothing but bitterness if I did in the end discover my father.
'Surely you understand the advantages of being bred a gentleman?' he
wound up.  'Under your grandfather's care you have a career before you,
a fine fortune in prospect, everything a young man can wish for.  And I
must tell you candidly, you run great risk of missing all these things by
hunting your father to earth.  Give yourself a little time: reflect on
it.'

'I have,' I cried.  'I have come out to find him, and I must.'

The colonel renewed his arguments and persuasions until he was worn out.
I thanked him continually for his kindness.  Clara Goodwin besought me in
a surprising manner to accompany her to England, called herself
Peribanou, and with that name conjured up my father to my eyes in his
breathing form.  She said, as her father had done, that I was called on
now to decide upon my future: she had a presentiment that evil would come
to me of my unchecked, headstrong will, which she dignified by terming it
a true but reckless affection: she believed she had been thrown in my
path to prove herself a serviceable friend, a Peribanou of twenty-six who
would not expect me to marry her when she had earned my gratitude.

They set Temple on me, and that was very funny.  To hear him with his
'I say, Richie, come, perhaps it's as well to know where a thing should
stop; your father knows you're at Riversley, and he'll be after you when
convenient; and just fancy the squire!' was laughable.  He had some
anxiety to be home again, or at least at Riversley.  I offered him to
Miss Goodwin.

She reproached me and coaxed me; she was exceedingly sweet.  'Well,' she
said, in an odd, resigned fashion, 'rest a day with us; will you refuse
me that?'

I consented; she knew not with what fretfulness.  We went out to gaze at
the shops and edifices, and I bought two light bags for slinging over the
shoulder, two nightshirts, toothbrushes, and pocket-combs, and a large
map of Germany.  By dint of vehement entreaties I led her to point to the
territory of the Prince of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.  'His income is rather
less than that of your grandfather, friend Harry,' she remarked.  I
doated on the spot until I could have dropped my finger on it blindfold.

Two or three pitched battles brought us to a friendly arrangement.  The
colonel exacted my promise that if I saw my father at Sarkeld in
Eppenwelzen I would not stay with him longer than seven days: and that if
he was not there I would journey home forthwith.  When I had yielded the
promise frankly on my honour, he introduced me to a banker of the city,
who agreed to furnish me money to carry me on to England in case I should
require it.  A diligence engaged to deliver me within a few miles of
Sarkeld.  I wrote a letter to my aunt Dorothy, telling her facts, and one
to the squire, beginning, 'We were caught on our arrival in London by the
thickest fog ever remembered,' as if it had been settled on my departure
from Riversley that Temple and I were bound for London.  Miss Goodwin was
my post-bag.  She said when we had dined, about two hours before the
starting of the diligence, 'Don't you think you ought to go and wish that

captain of the vessel you sailed in goodbye?'  I fell into her plot so
far as to walk down to the quays on the river-side and reconnoitre the
ship.  But there I saw my prison.  I kissed my hand to Captain Welsh's
mainmast rather ironically, though not without regard for him.  Miss
Goodwin lifted her eyelids at our reappearance.  As she made no
confession of her treason I did not accuse her, and perhaps it was owing
to a movement of her conscience that at our parting she drew me to her
near enough for a kiss to come of itself.

Four-and-twenty German words of essential service to a traveller in
Germany constituted our knowledge of the language, and these were on
paper transcribed by Miss Goodwin's own hand.  In the gloom of the
diligence, packed between Germans of a size that not even Tacitus had
prepared me for, smoked over from all sides, it was a fascinating study.
Temple and I exchanged the paper half-hourly while the light lasted.
When that had fled, nothing was left us to combat the sensation that we
were in the depths of a manure-bed, for the windows were closed, the
tobacco-smoke thickened, the hides of animals wrapping our immense
companions reeked; fire occasionally glowed in their pipe-bowls; they
were silent, and gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate
forces of nature.  I had most fantastic ideas,--that I had taken root and
ripened, and must expect my head to drop off at any instant: that I was
deep down, wedged in the solid mass of the earth.  But I need not repeat
them: they were accurately translated in imagination from my physical
miseries.  The dim revival of light, when I had well-nigh ceased to hope
for it, showed us all like malefactors imperfectly hanged, or drowned
wretches in a cabin under water.  I had one Colossus bulging over my
shoulder!  Temple was blotted out.  His face, emerging from beneath a
block of curly bearskin, was like that of one frozen in wonderment.
Outside there was a melting snow on the higher hills; the clouds over
them grew steel-blue.  We were going through a valley in a fir-forest.

Book 3.


XV.       We are Accosted by a Beautiful Little Lady in the Forest
XVI.      The Statue on the Promontory
XVII.     My Father Breathes, Moves, and Speaks
XVIII.    We Pass a Delightful Evening, and I Have a Morning Vision
XIX.      Our return Homeward
XX.       News of a Fresh Conquest of My Father's
XXI.      A Promenade in Bath
XXII.     Conclusion of the Bath Episode



Chapter XV

We are Accosted by a Beautiful Little Lady in the Forest



Bowls of hot coffee and milk, with white rolls of bread to dip in them,
refreshed us at a forest inn.  For some minutes after the meal Temple and
I talked like interchangeing puffs of steam, but soon subsided to our
staring fit.  The pipes were lit again.  What we heard sounded like a
language of the rocks and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of
gluttons feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the hinge in
every mouth.  Dumpy children, bulky men, compressed old women with baked
faces, and comical squat dogs, kept the villages partly alive.  We
observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite a dog, and he and
the dog took alternate bites off a platter-shaped cake, big enough to
require both his hands to hold it.  Whether the dog ever snapped more
than his share was matter of speculation to us.  It was an education for
him in good manners, and when we were sitting at dinner we wished our
companions had enjoyed it.  They fed with their heads in their plates,
splashed and clattered jaws, without paying us any hospitable attention
whatever, so that we had the dish of Lazarus.  They were perfectly kind,
notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of my great map of Germany to lie
spread over their knees in the diligence, whilst Temple and I pored along
the lines of the rivers.  One would thrust his square-nailed finger to
the name of a city and pronounce it; one gave us lessons in the
expression of the vowels, with the softening of three of them, which
seemed like a regulation drill movement for taking an egg into the mouth,
and showing repentance of the act.  'Sarkeld,' we exclaimed mutually, and
they made a galloping motion of their hands, pointing beyond the hills.
Sarkeld was to the right, Sarkeld to the left, as the road wound on.
Sarkeld was straight in front of us when the conductor, according to
directions he had received, requested us to alight and push through this
endless fir-forest up a hilly branch road, and away his hand galloped
beyond it, coming to a deep place, and then to grapes, then to a tip-toe
station, and under it lay Sarkeld.  The pantomime was not bad.  We waved
our hand to the diligence, and set out cheerfully, with our bags at our
backs, entering a gorge in the fir-covered hills before sunset, after
starting the proposition--Does the sun himself look foreign in a foreign
country?

'Yes, he does,' said Temple; and so I thought, but denied it, for by the
sun's favour I hoped to see my father that night, and hail Apollo
joyfully in the morning; a hope that grew with exercise of my limbs.
Beautiful cascades of dark bright water leaped down the gorge; we chased
an invisible animal.  Suddenly one of us exclaimed, 'We 're in a German
forest'; and we remembered grim tales of these forests, their awful
castles, barons, knights, ladies, long-bearded dwarfs, gnomes and thin
people.  I commenced a legend off-hand.

'No, no,' said Temple, as if curdling; 'let's call this place the mouth
of Hades.  Greek things don't make you feel funny.'

I laughed louder than was necessary, and remarked that I never had cared
so much for Greek as on board Captain Welsh's vessel.

'It's because he was all on the opposite tack I went on quoting,' said
Temple.  'I used to read with my father in the holidays, and your Rev.
Simon has kept you up to the mark; so it was all fair.  It 's not on our
consciences that we crammed the captain about our knowledge.'

'No.  I'm glad of it,' said I.

Temple pursued, 'Whatever happens to a fellow, he can meet anything so
long as he can say--I 've behaved like a man of honour.  And those German
tales--they only upset you.  You don't see the reason of the thing.  Why
is a man to be haunted half his life?  Well, suppose he did commit a
murder.  But if he didn't, can't he walk through an old castle without
meeting ghosts? or a forest?'

The dusky scenery of a strange land was influencing Temple.  It affected
me so, I made the worst of it for a cure.

'Fancy those pines saying, "There go two more," Temple.  Well; and fancy
this--a little earth-dwarf as broad as I'm long and high as my shoulder.
One day he met the loveliest girl in the whole country, and she promised
to marry him in twenty years' time, in return for a sack of jewels worth
all Germany and half England.  You should have seen her dragging it home.
People thought it full of charcoal.  She married the man she loved, and
the twenty years passed over, and at the stroke of the hour when she
first met the dwarf, thousands of bells began ringing through the forest,
and her husband cries out, "What is the meaning of it?"  and they rode up
to a garland of fresh flowers that dropped on her head, and right into a
gold ring that closed on her finger, and--look, Temple, look!'

'Where?' asked the dear little fellow, looking in all earnest, from which
the gloom of the place may be imagined, for, by suddenly mixing it with
my absurd story, I discomposed his air of sovereign indifference as much
as one does the surface of a lake by casting a stone in it.

We rounded the rocky corner of the gorge at a slightly accelerated pace
in dead silence.  It opened out to restorative daylight, and we breathed
better and chaffed one another, and, beholding a house with pendent gold
grapes, applauded the diligence conductor's expressive pantomime.  The
opportunity was offered for a draught of wine, but we held water
preferable, so we toasted the Priscilla out of the palms of our hands in
draughts of water from a rill that had the sound of aspen-leaves, such as
I used to listen to in the Riversley meadows, pleasantly familiar.

Several commanding elevations were in sight, some wooded, some bare.  We
chose the nearest, to observe the sunset, and concurred in thinking it
unlike English sunsets, though not so very unlike the sunset we had taken
for sunrise on board the Priscilla.  A tumbled, dark and light green
country of swelling forest-land and slopes of meadow ran to the West, and
the West from flaming yellow burned down to smoky crimson across it.
Temple bade--me 'catch the disc--that was English enough.'  A glance at
the sun's disc confirmed the truth of his observation.  Gazing on the
outline of the orb, one might have fancied oneself in England.  Yet the
moment it had sunk under the hill this feeling of ours vanished with it.
The coloured clouds drew me ages away from the recollection of home.

A tower on a distant hill, white among pines, led us to suppose that
Sarkeld must lie somewhere beneath it.  We therefore descended straight
toward the tower, instead of returning to the road, and struck
confidently into a rugged path.  Recent events had given me the assurance
that in my search for my father I was subject to a special governing
direction.  I had aimed at the Bench--missed it--been shipped across sea
and precipitated into the arms of friends who had seen him and could tell
me I was on his actual track, only blindly, and no longer blindly now.

'Follow the path,' I said, when Temple wanted to have a consultation.

'So we did in the London fog!' said he, with some gloom.

But my retort: 'Hasn't it brought us here?' was a silencer.

Dark night came on.  Every height stood for a ruin in our eyes, every dip
an abyss.  It grew bewilderingly dark, but the path did not forsake us,
and we expected, at half-hour intervals, to perceive the lights of
Sarkeld, soon to be thundering at one of the inns for admission and
supper.  I could hear Temple rehearsing his German vocabulary, 'Brod,
butter, wasser, fleisch, bett,' as we stumbled along.  Then it fell to
'Brod, wasser, bett,' and then, 'Bett' by itself, his confession of
fatigue.  Our path had frequently the nature of a waterway, and was very
fatiguing, more agreeable to mount than descend, for in mounting the
knees and shins bore the brunt of it, and these sufferers are not such
important servants of the footfarer as toes and ankles in danger of
tripping and being turned.

I was walking on leveller ground, my head bent and eyes half-shut, when a
flash of light in a brook at my feet caused me to look aloft.  The tower
we had marked after sunset was close above us, shining in a light of
torches.  We adopted the sensible explanation of this mysterious sight,
but were rather in the grip of the superstitious absurd one, until we
discerned a number of reddened men.

'Robbers!' exclaimed one of us.  Our common thought was, 'No; robbers
would never meet on a height in that manner'; and we were emboldened to
mount and request their help.

Fronting the tower, which was of white marble, a high tent had been
pitched on a green platform semicircled by pines.  Torches were stuck in
clefts of the trees, or in the fork of the branches, or held by boys and
men, and there were clearly men at work beneath the tent at a busy rate.
We could hear the paviour's breath escape from them.  Outside the ring of
torchbearers and others was a long cart with a dozen horses harnessed to
it.  All the men appeared occupied too much for chatter and laughter.
What could be underneath the tent?  Seeing a boy occasionally lift one of
the flapping corners, we took licence from his example to appease our
curiosity.  It was the statue of a bronze horse rearing spiritedly.  The
workmen were engaged fixing its pedestal in the earth.

Our curiosity being satisfied, we held debate upon our immediate
prospects.  The difficulty of making sure of a bed when you are once
detached from your home, was the philosophical reflection we arrived at,
for nothing practical presented itself.  To arm ourselves we pulled out
Miss Goodwin's paper.  'Gasthof is the word!' cried Temple.  ' Gasthof,
zimmer, bett; that means inn, hot supper, and bed.  We'll ask.' We asked
several of the men.  Those in motion shot a stare at us; the torchbearers
pointed at the tent and at an unseen height, muttering 'Morgen.'
Referring to Miss Goodwin's paper we discovered this to signify the
unintelligible word morning, which was no answer at all; but the men,
apparently deeming our conduct suspicious, gave us to understand by
rather menacing gestures that we were not wanted there, so we passed into
the dusk of the trees, angry at their incivility.  Had it been Summer we
should have dropped and slept.  The night air of a sharp season obliged
us to keep active, yet we were not willing to get far away from the
torches.  But after a time they were hidden; then we saw one moving
ahead.  The holder of it proved to be a workman of the gang, and between
us and him the strangest parley ensued.  He repeated the word morgen, and
we insisted on zimmer and bett.

'He takes us for twin Caspar Hausers,' sighed Temple.

'Nein,' said the man, and, perhaps enlightened by hearing a foreign
tongue, beckoned for us to step at his heels.

His lodging was a woodman's hut.  He offered us bread to eat, milk to
drink, and straw to lie on: we desired nothing more, and were happy,
though the bread was black, the milk sour, the straw mouldy.

Our breakfast was like a continuation of supper, but two little girls of
our host, whose heads were cased in tight-fitting dirty linen caps,
munched the black bread and drank the sour milk so thankfully, while
fixing solemn eyes of wonder upon us, that to assure them we were the
same sort of creature as themselves we pretended to relish the stuff.
Rather to our amazement we did relish it.  'Mutter!' I said to them.
They pointed to the room overhead.  Temple laid his cheek on his hand.
One of the little girls laid hers on the table.  I said 'Doctor?' They
nodded and answered 'Princess,' which seemed perfectly good English, and
sent our conjectures as to the state of their mother's health astray.  I
shut a silver English coin in one of their fat little hands.

We now, with the name Sarkeld, craved of their father a direction to that
place.  At the door of his but he waved his hand carelessly South for
Sarkeld, and vigorously West where the tower stood, then swept both hands
up to the tower, bellowed a fire of cannon, waved his hat, and stamped
and cheered.  Temple, glancing the way of the tower, performed on a
trumpet of his joined fists to show we understood that prodigious
attractions were presented by the tower; we said ja and ja, and
nevertheless turned into the Sarkeld path.

Some minutes later the sound of hoofs led us to imagine he had despatched
a messenger after us.  A little lady on a pony, attended by a tawny-faced
great square-shouldered groom on a tall horse, rode past, drew up on one
side, and awaited our coming.  She was dressed in a grey riding-habit and
a warm winter-jacket of gleaming grey fur, a soft white boa loose round
her neck, crossed at her waist, white gauntlets, and a pretty black felt
hat with flowing rim and plume.  There she passed as under review.  It
was a curious scene: the iron-faced great-sized groom on his bony black
charger dead still: his mistress, a girl of about eleven or twelve or
thirteen, with an arm bowed at her side, whip and reins in one hand, and
slips of golden brown hair straying on her flushed cheek; rocks and
trees, high silver firs rising behind her, and a slender water that fell
from the rocks running at her pony's feet.  Half-a-dozen yards were
between the charger's head and the pony's flanks.  She waited for us to
march by, without attempting to conceal that we were the objects of her
inspection, and we in good easy swing of the feet gave her a look as we
lifted our hats.  That look was to me like a net thrown into moonlighted
water: it brought nothing back but broken lights of a miraculous beauty.

Burning to catch an excuse for another look over my shoulder, I heard her
voice:

'Young English gentlemen!'

We turned sharp round.

It was she without a doubt who had addressed us: she spurred her pony to
meet us, stopped him, and said with the sweetest painful attempt at
accuracy in pronouncing a foreign tongue:

'I sthink you go a wrong way?'

Our hats flew off again, and bareheaded, I seized the reply before Temple
could speak.

'Is not this, may I ask you, the way to Sarkeld?'

She gathered up her knowledge of English deliberately.

'Yes, one goes to Sarkeld by sthis way here, but to-day goes everybody up
to our Bella Vista, and I entreat you do not miss it, for it is some-s-
thing to write to your home of.'

'Up at the tower, then?  Oh, we were there last night, and saw the bronze
horse, mademoiselle.'

'Yes, I know.  I called on my poor sick woman in a but where you fell
asleep, sirs.  Her little ones are my lambs; she has been of our
household; she is good; and they said, two young, strange, small
gentlemen have gone for Sarkeld; and I supposed, sthey cannot know all go
to our Bella Vista to-day.'

'You knew at once we were English, mademoiselle?'

'Yes, I could read it off your backs, and truly too your English eyes are
quite open at a glance.  It is of you both I speak.  If I but make my
words plain!  My "th" I cannot always.  And to understand, your English
is indeed heavy speech!  not so in books.  I have my English governess.
We read English tales, English poetry--and sthat is your excellence.  And
so, will you not come, sirs, up when a way is to be shown to you?  It is
my question.'

Temple thanked her for the kindness of the offer.

I was hesitating, half conscious of surprise that I should ever be
hesitating in doubt of taking the direction toward my father.  Hearing
Temple's boldness I thanked her also, and accepted.  Then she said,
bowing:

'I beg you will cover your heads.'

We passed the huge groom bolt upright on his towering horse; he raised
two fingers to the level of his eyebrows in the form of a salute.

Temple murmured: 'I shouldn't mind entering the German Army,' just as
after our interview with Captain Bulsted he had wished to enter the
British Navy.

This was no more than a sign that he was highly pleased.  For my part
delight fluttered the words in my mouth, so that I had to repeat half I
uttered to the attentive ears of our gracious new friend and guide:

'Ah,' she said, 'one does sthink one knows almost all before experiment.
I am ashamed, yet I will talk, for is it not so?  experiment is a school.
And you, if you please, will speak slow.  For I say of you English
gentlemen, silk you spin from your lips; it is not as a language of an
alphabet; it is pleasant to hear when one would lull, but Italian can do
that, and do it more--am I right? soft?

'Bella Vista, lovely view,' said I.

'Lovely view,' she repeated.

She ran on in the most musical tongue, to my thinking, ever heard:

'And see my little pensioners' poor cottage, who are out up to Lovely
View.  Miles round go the people to it. Good, and I will tell you
strangers: sthe Prince von Eppenwelzen had his great ancestor, and his
sister Markgrafin von Rippau said, "Erect a statue of him, for he was a
great warrior."  He could not, or he would not, we know not.  So she
said, "I will," she said, "I will do it in seven days."  She does
constantly amuse him, everybody at de Court.  Immense excitement!  For
suppose it!--a statue of a warrior on horseback, in perfect likeness,
chapeau tricorne, perruque, all of bronze, and his marshal's baton.  Eh
bien, well, a bronze horse is come at a gallop from Berlin; sthat we
know.  By fortune a most exalted sculptor in Berlin has him ready,--and
many horses pulled him to here, to Lovely View, by post-haste; sthat we
know.  But we are in extremity of puzzlement.  For where is the statue to
ride him?  where--am I plain to you, sirs?--is sthe Marshal Furst von
Eppenwelzen, our great ancestor?  Yet the Markgrafin says, "It is right,
wait!"  She nods, she smiles.  Our Court is all at de lake-palace odder
side sthe tower, and it is bets of gems, of feathers, of lace, not to be
numbered!  The Markgrafin says--sthere to-day you see him, Albrecht
Wohlgemuth Furst von Eppenwelzen!  But no sculptor can have cast him in
bronze--not copied him and cast him in a time of seven days!  And we say
sthis:--Has she given a secret order to a sculptor--you understand me,
sirs, commission--where, how, has he sthe likeness copied?  Or did he
come to our speisesaal of our lake-palace disguised?  Oh!  but to see, to
copy, to model, to cast in bronze, to travel betwixt Berlin and Sarkeld
in a time of seven days?  No!  so-oh!  we guess, we guess, we are in
exhaustion.  And to-day is like an eagle we have sent an arrow to shoot
and know not if he will come down.  For shall we see our ancestor on
horseback?  It will be a not-scribable joy!  Or not?  So we guess, we are
worried.  At near eleven o'clock a cannon fires, sthe tent is lifted, and
we see; but I am impatient wid my breaths for de gun to go.'

I said it would be a fine sight.

'For strangers, yes; you should be of de palace to know what a fine
sight!  sthe finest!  And you are for Sarkeld?  You have friends in
Sarkeld?'

'My father is in Sarkeld, mademoiselle.  I am told he is at the palace.'

'Indeed; and he is English, your fater?'

'Yes.  I have not seen him for years; I have come to find him.'

'Indeed; it is for love of him, your fater, sir, you come, and not speak
German?'

I signified that it was so.

'She stroked her pony's neck musing.

'Because, of love is not much in de family in England, it is said,' she
remarked very shyly, and in recovering her self-possession asked the name
of my father.

'His name, mademoiselle, is Mr. Richmond.'

'Mr. Richmond?'

'Mr. Richmond Roy.'

She sprang in her saddle.

'You are son to Mr. Richmond Roy?  Oh!  it is wonderful.'

'Mademoiselle, then you have seen him lately?'

'Yes, yes!  I have seen him.  I have heard of his beautiful child, his
son; and you it is?'

She studied my countenance a moment.

'Tell me, is he well?' mademoiselle, is he quite well?'

'Oh, yes,' she answered, and broke into smiles of merriment, and then
seemed to bite her underlip.  'He is our fun-maker.  He must always be
well.  I owe to him some of my English.  You are his son?  you were for
Sarkeld?  You will see him up at our Bella Vista.  Quick, let us run.'

She put her pony to a canter up the brown path between the fir-trees,
crying that she should take our breath; but we were tight runners, and I,
though my heart beat wildly, was full of fire to reach the tower on the
height; so when she slackened her pace, finding us close on her pony's
hoofs, she laughed and called us brave boys.  Temple's being no more than
my friend, who had made the expedition with me out of friendship,
surprised her.  Not that she would not have expected it to be done by
Germans; further she was unable to explain her astonishment.

At a turning of the ascent she pointed her whip at the dark knots and
lines of the multitude mounting by various paths to behold the ceremony
of unveiling the monument.

I besought her to waste no time.

'You must, if you please, attend my pleasure, if I guide you,' she said,
tossing her chin.

'I thank you, I can't tell you how much, mademoiselle,' said I.

She answered: 'You were kind to my two pet lambs, sir.'

So we moved forward.

Chapter XVI

The Statue on the Promontory



The little lady was soon bowing to respectful salutations from crowds of
rustics and others on a broad carriage-way circling level with the
height.  I could not help thinking how doubly foreign I was to all the
world here--I who was about to set eyes on my lost living father, while
these people were tip-toe to gaze on a statue.  But as my father might
also be taking an interest in the statue, I got myself round to a
moderate sentiment of curiosity and a partial share of the general
excitement.  Temple and mademoiselle did most of the conversation, which
related to glimpses of scenery, pine, oak, beech-wood, and lake-water,
until we gained the plateau where the tower stood, when the giant groom
trotted to the front, and worked a clear way for us through a mass of
travelling sight-seers, and she leaned to me, talking quite inaudibly
amid the laughter and chatting.  A band of wind instruments burst out.
'This is glorious!' I conceived Temple to cry like an open-mouthed mute.
I found it inspiriting.

The rush of pride and pleasure produced by the music was irresistible.
We marched past the tower, all of us, I am sure, with splendid feelings.
A stone's throw beyond it was the lofty tent; over it drooped a flag, and
flags were on poles round a wide ring of rope guarded by foresters and
gendarmes, mounted and afoot.  The band, dressed in green, with black
plumes to their hats, played in the middle of the ring.  Outside were
carriages, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback, full of animation;
rustics, foresters, town and village people, men, women, and children,
pressed against the ropes.  It was a day of rays of sunshine, now from
off one edge, now from another of large slow clouds, so that at times we
and the tower were in a blaze; next the lake-palace was illuminated, or
the long grey lake and the woods of pine and of bare brown twigs making
bays in it.

Several hands beckoned on our coming in sight of the carriages.  'There
he is, then!' I thought; and it was like swallowing my heart in one solid
lump.  Mademoiselle had free space to trot ahead of us.  We saw a tall-
sitting lady, attired in sables, raise a finger to her, and nip her chin.
Away the little lady flew to a second carriage, and on again, as one may
when alive with an inquiry.  I observed to Temple, 'I wonder whether she
says in her German, "It is my question"; do you remember?' There was no
weight whatever in what I said or thought.

She rode back, exclaiming, 'Nowhere.  He is nowhere, and nobody knows.
He will arrive.  But he is not yet.  Now,' she bent coaxingly down to me,
'can you not a few words of German?  Only a smallest sum!  It is the
Markgrafin, my good aunt, would speak wid you, and she can no English-
only she is eager to behold you, and come!  You will know, for my sake,
some scrap of German--ja?  You will--nicht wahr?  Or French?  Make your
glom-pudding of it, will you?'

I made a shocking plum-pudding of it.  Temple was no happier.

The margravine, a fine vigorous lady with a lively mouth and livelier
eyes of a restless grey that rarely dwelt on you when she spoke, and
constantly started off on a new idea, did me the honour to examine me,
much as if I had offered myself for service in her corps of grenadiers,
and might do in time, but was decreed to be temporarily wanting in manly
proportions.

She smiled a form of excuse of my bungling half-English horrid French,
talked over me and at me, forgot me, and recollected me, all within
a minute, and fished poor Temple for intelligible replies to
incomprehensible language in the same manner, then threw her head
back to gather the pair of us in her sight, then eyed me alone.

'C'est peut-etre le fils de son petit papa, et c'est tout dire.'

Such was her summary comment.

But not satisfied with that, she leaned out of the carriage, and, making
an extraordinary grimace appear the mother in labour of the difficult
words, said, 'Doos yo' laff?'

There was no helping it: I laughed like a madman, giving one outburst and
a dead stop.

Far from looking displeased, she nodded.  I was again put to the dreadful
test.

'Can yo' mak' laff?'

It spurred my wits.  I had no speech to 'mak' laff' with.  At the very
instant of my dilemma I chanced to see a soberly-clad old townsman
hustled between two helpless women of the crowd, his pipe in his mouth,
and his hat, wig, and handkerchief sliding over his face, showing his
bald crown, and he not daring to cry out, for fear his pipe should be
trodden under foot.

'He can, your Highness.'

Her quick eyes caught the absurd scene.  She turned to one of her ladies
and touched her forehead.  Her hand was reached out to me; Temple she
patted on the shoulder.

'He can--ja: du auch.'

A grand gentleman rode up.  They whispered, gazed at the tent, and
appeared to speak vehemently.  All the men's faces were foreign: none of
them had the slightest resemblance to my father's.  I fancied I might
detect him disguised.  I stared vainly.  Temple, to judge by the
expression of his features, was thinking.  Yes, thought I, we might as
well be at home at old Riversley, that distant spot!  We 're as out of
place here as frogs in the desert!

Riding to and fro, and chattering, and commotion, of which the margravine
was the centre, went on, and the band played beautiful waltzes.  The
workmen in and out of the tent were full of their business, like seamen
under a storm.

'Fraulein Sibley,' the margravine called.

I hoped it might be an English name.  So it proved to be; and the delight
of hearing English spoken, and, what was more, having English ears to
speak to, was blissful as the leap to daylight out of a nightmare.

'I have the honour to be your countrywoman,' said a lady, English all
over to our struggling senses.

We became immediately attached to her as a pair of shipwrecked boats
lacking provender of every sort are taken in tow by a well-stored vessel.
She knew my father, knew him intimately.  I related all I had to tell,
and we learnt that we had made acquaintance with her pupil, the Princess
Ottilia Wilhelmina Frederika Hedwig, only child of the Prince of
Eppenwelzen.

'Your father will certainly be here; he is generally the margravine's
right hand, and it's wonderful the margravine can do without him so
long,' said Miss Sibley, and conversed with the margravine; after which
she informed me that she had been graciously directed to assure me my
father would be on the field when the cannon sounded.

'Perhaps you know nothing of Court life?' she resumed.  'We have very
curious performances in Sarkeld, and we owe it to the margravine that we
are frequently enlivened.  You see the tall gentleman who is riding away
from her.  I mean the one with the black hussar jacket and thick brown
moustache.  That is the prince.  Do you not think him handsome?  He is
very kind--rather capricious; but that is a way with princes.  Indeed, I
have no reason to complain.  He has lost his wife, the Princess
Frederika, and depends upon his sister the margravine for amusement.  He
has had it since she discovered your papa.'

'Is the gun never going off?' I groaned.

'If they would only conduct their ceremonies without their guns!'
exclaimed Miss Sibley.  'The origin of the present ceremony is this: the
margravine wished to have a statue erected to an ancestor, a renowned
soldier--and I would infinitely prefer talking of England.  But never
mind.  Oh, you won't understand what you gaze at.  Well, the prince did
not care to expend the money.  Instead of urging that as the ground of
his refusal, he declared there were no sculptors to do justice to Prince
Albrecht Wohlgemuth, and one could not rely on their effecting a
likeness.  We have him in the dining-hall; he was strikingly handsome.
Afterward he pretended--I'm speaking now of the existing Prince Ernest--
that it would be ages before the statue was completed.  One day the
margravine induced him to agree to pay the sum stipulated for by the
sculptor, on condition of the statue being completed for public
inspection within eight days of the hour of their agreement.  The whole
Court was witness to it.  They arranged for the statue, horse and man, to
be exhibited for a quarter of an hour.  Of course, the margravine did not
signify it would be a perfectly finished work.  We are kept at a great
distance, that we may not scrutinize it too closely.  They unveil it to
show she has been as good as her word, and then cover it up to fix the
rider to the horse,--a screw is employed, I imagine.  For one thing we
know about it, we know that the horse and the horseman travelled hither
separately.  In all probability, the margravine gave the order for the
statue last autumn in Berlin.  Now look at the prince.  He has his eye on
you.  Look down.  Now he has forgotten you.  He is impatient to behold
the statue.  Our chief fear is that the statue will not maintain its
balance.  Fortunately, we have plenty of guards to keep the people from
pushing against it.  If all turns out well, I shall really say the
margravine has done wonders.  She does not look anxious; but then she is
not one ever to show it.  The prince does.  Every other minute he is
glancing at the tent and at his watch.  Can you guess my idea?  Your
father's absence leads me to think-oh! only a passing glimmer of an idea
--the statue has not arrived, and he is bringing it on.  Otherwise, he
would be sure to be here.  The margravine beckons me.'

'Don't go!' we cried simultaneously.

The Princess Ottilia supplied her place.

'I have sent to our stables for two little pretty Hungarian horses for
you two to ride,' she said.  'No, I have not yet seen him.  He is asked
for, and de Markgrafin knows not at all.  He bades in our lake; he has
been seen since.  The man is exciteable; but he is so sensible.  Oh, no.
And he is full of laughter.  We shall soon see him.  Would he not ever be
cautious of himself for a son like you?'

Her compliment raised a blush on me.

The patience of the people was creditable to their phlegm.  The smoke of
pipes curling over the numberless heads was the most stirring thing about
them.

Temple observed to me,

'We'll give the old statue a British cheer, won't we, Richie?'

'After coming all the way from England!' said I, in dejection.

'No, no, Richie; you're sure of him now.  He 's somewhere directing
affairs, I suspect.  I say, do let us show them we can ring out the right
tune upon occasion.  By jingo!  there goes a fellow with a match.'

We saw the cannonier march up to the margravine's carriage for orders.
She summoned the prince to her side.  Ladies in a dozen carriages were
standing up, handkerchief in hand, and the gentlemen got their horses'
heads on a line.  Temple counted nearly sixty persons of quality
stationed there.  The workmen were trooping out of the tent.

Miss Sibley ran to us, saying,--

'The gun-horror has been commanded.  Now then: the prince can scarcely
contain himself.  The gunner is ready near his gun; he has his frightful
match lifted.  See, the manager-superintendent is receiving the
margravine's last injunctions.  How firm women's nerves are!  Now the
margravine insists on the prince's reading the exact time by her watch.
Everybody is doing it.  Let us see.  By my watch it is all but fifteen
minutes to eleven, A.M.  Dearest,' she addressed the little princess;
'would you not like to hold my hand until the gun is fired?'

'Dearest,' replied the princess, whether in childish earnest or irony I
could not divine, 'if I would hold a hand it would be a gentleman's.'

All eyes were on the Prince of Eppenwelzen, as he gazed toward the
covered statue.  With imposing deliberation his hand rose to his hat.  We
saw the hat raised.  The cannon was fired and roared; the band struck up
a pompous slow march: and the tent-veil broke apart and rolled off.  It
was like the dawn flying and sunrise mounting.

I confess I forgot all thought of my father for awhile; the shouts of the
people, the braying of the brass instruments, the ladies cheering
sweetly, the gentlemen giving short, hearty expressions of applause,
intoxicated me.  And the statue was superb-horse and rider in new bronze
polished by sunlight.

'It is life-like!  it is really noble!  it is a true Prince!' exclaimed
Miss Sibley.  She translated several exclamations of the ladies and
gentlemen in German: they were entirely to the same effect.  The horse
gave us a gleam of his neck as he pawed a forefoot, just reined in.  We
knew him; he was a gallant horse; but it was the figure of the Prince
Albrecht that was so fine.  I had always laughed at sculptured figures on
horseback.  This one overawed me.  The Marshal was acknowledging the
salute of his army after a famous victory over the infidel Turks.  He sat
upright, almost imperceptibly but effectively bending his head in harmony
with the curve of his horse's neck, and his baton swept the air low in
proud submission to the honours cast on him by his acclaiming soldiery.
His three-cornered lace hat, curled wig, heavy-trimmed surcoat, and high
boots, reminded me of Prince Eugene.  No Prince Eugene--nay, nor
Marlborough, had such a martial figure, such an animated high old
warrior's visage.  The bronze features reeked of battle.

Temple and I felt humiliated (without cause, I granted) at the success of
a work of Art that struck us as a new military triumph of these Germans,
and it was impossible not to admire it.  The little Princess Ottilia
clapped hands by fits.  What words she addressed to me I know not.  I
dealt out my stock of German--'Ja, ja--to her English.  We were drawn by
her to congratulate the margravine, whose hand was then being kissed by
the prince: he did it most courteously and affectionately.  Other
gentlemen, counts and barons, bowed over her hand.  Ladies, according to
their rank and privileges, saluted her on the cheek or in some graceful
fashion.  When our turn arrived, Miss Sibley translated for us, and as we
were at concert pitch we did not acquit ourselves badly.  Temple's remark
was, that he wished she and all her family had been English.  Nothing was
left for me to say but that the margravine almost made us wish we had
been German.

Smiling cordially, the margravine spoke, Miss Sibley translated:

'Her Royal Highness asks you if you have seen your father?'

I shook my head.

The Princess Ottilia translated, 'Her Highness, my good aunt, would know,
would you know him, did you see him?'

'Yes, anywhere,' I cried.

The margravine pushed me back with a gesture.

'Yes, your Highness, on my honour; anywhere on earth!'

She declined to hear the translation.

Her insulting disbelief in my ability to recognize the father I had come
so far to embrace would have vexed me but for the wretched thought that I
was losing him again.  We threaded the carriages; gazed at the horsemen
in a way to pierce the hair on their faces.  The little princess came on
us hurriedly.

'Here, see, are the horses.  I will you to mount.  Are they not pretty
animals?' She whispered, 'I believe your fater have been hurt in his mind
by something.  It is only perhaps.  Now mount, for de Markgrafin says you
are our good guests.'

We mounted simply to show that we could mount, for we would rather have
been on foot, and drew up close to the right of the margravine's
carriage.

'Hush!  a poet is reading his ode,' said the princess.  'It is Count
Fretzel von Wolfenstein.'

This ode was dreadful to us, and all the Court people pretended they
liked it.  When he waved his right hand toward the statue there was a
shout from the rustic set; when he bowed to the margravine, the ladies
and gentlemen murmured agreeably and smiled.  We were convinced of its
being downright hypocrisy, rustic stupidity, Court flattery.  We would
have argued our case, too.  I proposed a gallop; Temple said,

'No, we'll give the old statue our cheer as soon as this awful fellow has
done.  I don't care much for poetry, but don't let me ever have to stand
and hear German poetry again for the remainder of my life.'

We could not imagine why they should have poetry read out to them instead
of their fine band playing, but supposed it was for the satisfaction of
the margravine, with whom I grew particularly annoyed on hearing Miss
Sibley say she conceived her Highness to mean that my father was actually
on the ground, and that we neither of us, father and son, knew one
another.  I swore on my honour, on my life, he was not present; and the
melancholy in my heart taking the form of extreme irritation, I spoke
passionately.  I rose in my stirrups, ready to shout, 'Father!  here's
Harry Richmond come to see you.  Where are you!' I did utter something--
a syllable or two: 'Make haste!' I think the words were.  They sprang
from my inmost bosom, addressed without forethought to that drawling
mouthing poet.  The margravine's face met mine like a challenge.  She had
her lips tight in a mere lip-smile, and her eyes gleamed with
provocation.

'Her Highness,' Miss Sibley translated, 'asks whether you are prepared to
bet that your father is not on the ground?'

'Beg her to wait two minutes, and I'll be prepared to bet any sum,'
said I.

Temple took one half the circle, I the other, riding through the
attentive horsemen and carriage-lines, and making sure the face we sought
was absent, more or less discomposing everybody.  The poet finished his
ode; he was cheered, of course.  Mightily relieved, I beheld the band
resuming their instruments, for the cheering resembled a senseless
beating on brass shields.  I felt that we English could do it better.
Temple from across the sector of the circle, running about two feet in
front of the statue, called aloud,

'Richie!  he's not here!'

'Not here!' cried I.

The people gazed up at us, wondering at the tongue we talked.

'Richie!  now let 's lead these fellows off with a tiptop cheer!'

Little Temple crowed lustily.

The head of the statue turned from Temple to me.

I found the people falling back with amazed exclamations.  I--so
prepossessed was I--simply stared at the sudden-flashing white of the
statue's eyes.  The eyes, from being an instant ago dull carved balls,
were animated.  They were fixed on me.  I was unable to give out a
breath.  Its chest heaved; both bronze hands struck against the bosom.

'Richmond!  my son!  Richie!  Harry Richmond!  Richmond Roy!'

That was what the statue gave forth.

My head was like a ringing pan.  I knew it was my father, but my father
with death and strangeness, earth, metal, about him; and his voice was
like a human cry contending with earth and metal-mine was stifled.  I saw
him descend.  I dismounted.  We met at the ropes and embraced.  All his
figure was stiff, smooth, cold.  My arms slid on him.  Each time he spoke
I thought it an unnatural thing: I myself had not spoken once.

After glancing by hazard at the empty saddle of the bronze horse, I
called to mind more clearly the appalling circumstance which had
stupefied the whole crowd.  They had heard a statue speak--had seen a
figure of bronze walk.  For them it was the ancestor of their prince; it
was the famous dead old warrior of a hundred and seventy years ago set
thus in motion.  Imagine the behaviour of people round a slain tiger that
does not compel them to fly, and may yet stretch out a dreadful paw!
Much so they pressed for a nearer sight of its walnut visage, and shrank
in the act.  Perhaps I shared some of their sensations.  I cannot tell:
my sensations were tranced.  There was no warmth to revive me in the
gauntlet I clasped.  I looked up at the sky, thinking that it had fallen
dark.

Chapter XVII

My Father Breathes, Moves, and Speaks



The people broke away from us like furrowed water as we advanced on each
side of the ropes toward the margravine's carriage.

I became a perfectly mechanical creature: incapable, of observing, just
capable of taking an impression here and there; and in such cases the
impressions that come are stamped on hot wax; they keep the scene fresh;
they partly pervert it as well.  Temple's version is, I am sure, the
truer historical picture.  He, however, could never repeat it twice
exactly alike, whereas I failed not to render image for image in clear
succession as they had struck me at the time.  I could perceive that the
figure of the Prince Albrecht, in its stiff condition, was debarred from
vaulting, or striding, or stooping, so that the ropes were a barrier
between us.  I saw the little Princess Ottilia eyeing us with an absorbed
comprehensive air quite unlike the manner of a child.  Dots of heads,
curious faces, peering and starting eyes, met my vision.  I heard sharp
talk in German, and a rider flung his arm, as if he wished to crash the
universe, and flew off.  The margravine seemed to me more an implacable
parrot than a noble lady.  I thought to myself: This is my father, and I
am not overjoyed or grateful.  In the same way, I felt that the daylight
was bronze, and I did not wonder at it: nay, I reasoned on the
probability of a composition of sun and mould producing that colour.
The truth was, the powers of my heart and will were frozen; I thought
and felt at random.  And I crave excuses for dwelling on such trifling
phenomena of the sensations, which have been useful to me by helping me
to realize the scene, even as at the time they obscured it.

According to Temple's description, when the statue moved its head toward
him, a shudder went through the crowd, and a number of forefingers were
levelled at it, and the head moved toward me, marked of them all.  Its
voice was answered by a dull puling scream from women, and the men gaped.
When it descended from the saddle, the act was not performed with one
bound, as I fancied, but difficultly; and it walked up to me like a
figure dragging logs at its heels.  Half-a-dozen workmen ran to arrest
it; some townswomen fainted.  There was a heavy altercation in German
between the statue and the superintendent of the arrangements.  The sun
shone brilliantly on our march to the line of carriages where the Prince
of Eppenwelzen was talking to the margravine in a fury, and he dashed
away on his horse, after bellowing certain directions to his foresters
and the workmen, by whom we were surrounded; while the margravine talked
loudly and amiably, as though everything had gone well.  Her watch was
out.  She acknowledged my father's bow, and overlooked him.  She seemed
to have made her courtiers smile.  The ladies and gentlemen obeyed the
wave of her hand by quitting the ground; the band headed a long line of
the commoner sort, and a body of foresters gathered the remnants and
joined them to the rear of the procession.  A liveried groom led away
Temple's horse and mine.  Temple declared he could not sit after seeing
the statue descend from its pedestal.

Her Highness's behaviour roughened as soon as the place was clear of
company.  She spoke at my father impetuously, with manifest scorn and
reproach, struck her silver-mounted stick on the carriage panels, again
and again stamped her foot, lifting a most variable emphatic countenance.
Princess Ottilia tried to intercede.  The margravine clenched her hands,
and, to one not understanding her speech, appeared literally to blow the
little lady off with the breath of her mouth.  Her whole bearing
consisted of volleys of abuse, closed by magisterial interrogations.
Temple compared her Highness's language to the running out of Captain
Welsh's chaincable, and my father's replies to the hauling in: his
sentences were short, they sounded like manful protestations; I barely
noticed them.  Temple's version of it went: 'And there was your father
apologizing, and the margravine rating him,' etc.  My father, as it
happened, was careful not to open his lips wide on account of the
plaster, or thick coating of paint on his face.  No one would have
supposed that he was burning with indignation; the fact being, that to
give vent to it, he would have had to exercise his muscular strength; he
was plastered and painted from head to foot.  The fixture of his wig and
hat, too, constrained his skin, so that his looks were no index of his
feelings.  I longed gloomily for the moment to come when he would present
himself to me in his natural form.  He was not sensible of the touch of
my hand, nor I of his.  There we had to stand until the voluble portion
of the margravine's anger came to an end.  She shut her eyes and bowed
curtly to our salute.

'You have seen the last of me, madam,' my father said to her whirling
carriage-wheels.

He tried to shake, and strained in his ponderous garments.  Temple gazed
abashed.  I knew not how to act.  My father kept lifting his knees on the
spot as if practising a walk.

The tent was in its old place covering the bronze horse.  A workman
stepped ahead of us, and we all went at a strange leisurely pace down the
hill through tall pinetrees to where a closed vehicle awaited us.  Here
were also a couple of lackeys, who deposited my father on a bed of moss,
and with much effort pulled his huge boots off, leaving him in red silk
stockings.  Temple and I snatched his gauntlets; Temple fell backward,
but we had no thought of laughter; people were seen approaching, and the
three of us jumped into the carriage.  I had my father's living hand in
mine to squeeze; feeling him scarcely yet the living man I had sought,
and with no great warmth of feeling.  His hand was very moist.  Often I
said, 'Dear father!--Papa, I'm so glad at last,' in answer to his short-
breathed 'Richie, my little lad, my son Richmond!  You found me out; you
found me!'  We were conscious that his thick case of varnished clothing
was against us.  One would have fancied from his way of speaking that he
suffered from asthma.  I was now gifted with a tenfold power of
observation, and let nothing escape me.

Temple, sitting opposite, grinned cheerfully at times to encourage our
spirits; he had not recovered from his wonderment, nor had I introduced
him.  My father, however, had caught his name.  Temple (who might as well
have talked, I thought) was perpetually stealing secret glances of
abstracted perusal at him with a pair of round infant's eyes, sucking his
reflections the while.  My father broke our silence.

'Mr. Temple, I have the honour,' he said, as if about to cough; 'the
honour of making your acquaintance; I fear you must surrender the hope of
making mine at present.'

Temple started and reddened like a little fellow detected in straying
from his spelling-book, which was the window-frame.  In a minute or so
the fascination proved too strong for him; his eyes wandered from the
window and he renewed his shy inspection bit by bit as if casting up a
column of figures.

'Yes, Mr. Temple, we are in high Germany,' said my father.

It must have cost Temple cruel pain, for he was a thoroughly gentlemanly
boy, and he could not resist it.  Finally he surprised himself in his
stealthy reckoning: arrived at the full-breech or buttoned waistband,
about half-way up his ascent from the red silk stocking, he would pause
and blink rapidly, sometimes jump and cough.

To put him at his ease, my father exclaimed, 'As to this exterior,' he
knocked his knuckles on the heaving hard surface, 'I can only affirm that
it was, on horseback--ahem! particularly as the horse betrayed no
restivity, pronounced perfect!  The sole complaint of our interior
concerns the resemblance we bear to a lobster.  Human somewhere, I do
believe myself to be.  I shall have to be relieved of my shell before I
can at all satisfactorily proclaim the fact.  I am a human being, believe
me.'

He begged permission to take breath a minute.

'I know you for my son's friend, Mr. Temple: here is my son, my boy,
Harry Lepel Richmond Roy.  Have patience: I shall presently stand
unshelled.  I have much to relate; you likewise have your narrative in
store.  That you should have lit on me at the critical instant is one of
those miracles which combine to produce overwhelming testimony--ay,
Richie! without a doubt there is a hand directing our destiny.'  His
speaking in such a strain, out of pure kindness to Temple, huskily, with
his painful attempt to talk like himself, revived his image as the father
of my heart and dreams, and stirred my torpid affection, though it was
still torpid enough, as may be imagined, when I state that I remained
plunged in contemplation of his stocking of red silk emerging from the
full bronzed breech, considering whether his comparison of himself to a
shell-fish might not be a really just one.  We neither of us regained our
true natures until he was free of every vestige of the garb of Prince
Albrecht Wohlgemuth.  Attendants were awaiting him at the garden-gate of
a beautiful villa partly girdled by rising fir-woods on its footing of
bright green meadow.  They led him away, and us to bath-rooms.

Chapter XVIII

We Pass a Delightful Evening, and I Have a Morning Vision



In a long saloon ornamented with stags' horns and instruments of the
chase, tusks of boars, spear-staves, boarknives, and silver horns, my
father, I, and Temple sat down to a memorable breakfast, my father in his
true form, dressed in black silken jacket and knee-breeches, purple-
stockings and pumps; without a wig, I thanked heaven to see.  How
blithely he flung out his limbs and heaved his chest released from
confinement!  His face was stained brownish, but we drank old Rhine wine,
and had no eye for appearances.

'So you could bear it no longer, Richie?' My father interrupted the
narrative I doled out, anxious for his, and he began, and I interrupted
him.

'You did think of me often, papa, didn't you?'

His eyes brimmed with tenderness.

'Think of you!' he sighed.

I gave him the account of my latest adventures in a few panting breaths,
suppressing the Bench.  He set my face to front him.

'We are two fools, Mr. Temple,' he said.

'No, sir,' said Temple.

'Now you speak, papa,' said I.

He smiled warmly.

'Richie begins to remember me.'

I gazed at him to show it was true.

'I do, papa--I'm not beginning to.'

At his request, I finished the tale of my life at school.  'Ah, well!
that was bad fortune; this is good!' he exclaimed.  'Tis your father, my
son: 'tis day-light, though you look at it through a bed-curtain, and
think you are half-dreaming.  Now then for me, Richie.'

My father went on in this wise excitedly:

'I was laying the foundation of your fortune here, my boy.  Heavens!
when I was in that bronze shell I was astonished only at my continence in
not bursting.  You have grown,--you have shot up and filled out.  I
register my thanks to your grandfather Beltham; the same, in a minor
degree, to Captain Jasper Welsh.  Between that man Rippenger and me there
shall be dealings.  He flogged you: let that pass.  He exposed you to the
contempt of your school-fellows because of a breach in my correspondence
with a base-born ferule-swinger.  What are we coming to?  Richie, my son,
I was building a future for you here.  And Colonel Goodwin-Colonel
Goodwin, you encountered him too, and his marriageable daughter--I owe it
to them that I have you here!  Well, in the event of my sitting out the
period this morning as the presentment of Prince Albrecht, I was to have
won something would have astonished that unimpressionable countryman of
ours.  Goodness gracious, my boy!  when I heard your English shout, it
went to my marrow.  Could they expect me to look down on my own flesh and
blood, on my son--my son Richmond--after a separation of years, and
continue a statue?  Nay, I followed my paternal impulse.  Grant that the
show was spoilt, does the Markgrafin insist on my having a bronze heart
to carry on her pastime?  Why, naturally, I deplore a failure, let the
cause be what it will.  Whose regrets can eclipse those of the principal
actor?  Quotha!  as our old Plays have it.  Regrets?  Did I not for
fifteen minutes and more of mortal time sit in view of a multitude,
motionless, I ask you, like a chiselled block of stone,--and the compact
was one quarter of an hour, and no farther?  That was my stipulation.  I
told her--I can hold out one quarter of an hour: I pledged myself to it.
Who, then, is to blame?  I was exposed to view twenty-three minutes, odd
seconds.  Is there not some ancient story of a monstrous wretch baked in
his own bull?  My situation was as bad.  If I recollect aright, he could
roar; no such relief was allowed to me.  And I give you my word, Richie,
lads both, that while that most infernal Count Fretzel was pouring forth
his execrable humdrum, I positively envied the privilege of an old
palsied fellow, chief boatman of the forest lake, for, thinks I, hang
him! he can nod his head and I can not.  Let me assure you, twenty
minutes of an ordeal like that,--one posture, mind you, no raising of
your eyelids, taking your breath mechanically, and your heart beating--
jumping like an enraged balletdancer boxed in your bosom--a literal
description, upon my honour; and not only jumping, jumping every now and
then, I may say, with a toe in your throat: I was half-choked:--well, I
say, twenty minutes, twenty-seven minutes and a half of that, getting on,
in fact, to half-an-hour, it is superhuman!--by heavens, it is heroical!

And observe my reward: I have a son--my only one.  I have been divided
from him for years; I am establishing his fortune; I know he is provided
with comforts: Richie, you remember the woman Waddy?  A faithful soul!
She obtained my consent at last--previously I had objections; in fact,
your address was withheld from the woman--to call at your school.  She
saw Rippenger, a girl of considerable attractions.  She heard you were
located at Riversley: I say, I know the boy is comfortably provided for;
but we have been separated since he was a little creature with curls on
his forehead, scarce breeched '

I protested:

'Papa, I have been in jacket and trousers I don't know how long.'

'Let me pursue,' said my father.  'And to show you, Richie, it is a
golden age ever when you and I are together, and ever shall be till we
lose our manly spirit, and we cling to that,--till we lose our princely
spirit, which we never will abandon--perish rather!--I drink to you, and
challenge you; and, mind you, old Hock wine has charms.  If Burgundy is
the emperor of wines, Hock is the empress.  For youngsters, perhaps, I
should except the Hock that gets what they would fancy a trifle pique,
turned with age, so as to lose in their opinion its empress flavour.'

Temple said modestly: 'I should call that the margravine of wines.'

My father beamed on him with great approving splendour.  'Join us, Mr.
Temple; you are a man of wit, and may possibly find this specimen worthy
of you.  This wine has a history.  You are drinking wine with blood in
it.  Well, I was saying, the darling of my heart has been torn from me; I
am in a foreign land; foreign, that is, by birth, and on the whole
foreign.  Yes!--I am the cynosure of eyes; I am in a singular posture, a
singular situation; I hear a cry in the tongue of my native land, and
what I presume is my boy's name: I look, I behold him, I follow a
parent's impulse.  On my soul!  none but a fish-father could have stood
against it.

Well, for this my reward is--and I should have stepped from a cathedral
spire just the same, if I had been mounted on it--that I, I,--and the
woman knows all my secret--I have to submit to the foul tirade of a
vixen.

She drew language, I protest, from the slums.  And I entreat you, Mr.
Temple, with your "margravine of wines"--which was very neatly said, to
be sure--note you this curious point for the confusion of Radicals in
your after life; her Highness's pleasure was to lend her tongue to the
language--or something like it--of a besotted fish-wife; so! very well,
and just as it is the case with that particular old Hock you youngsters
would disapprove of, and we cunning oldsters know to contain more virtues
in maturity than a nunnery of May-blooming virgins, just so the very
faults of a royal lady-royal by birth and in temper a termagant--impart a
perfume!  a flavour!  You must age; you must live in Courts, you must
sound the human bosom, rightly to appreciate it.  She is a woman of the
most malicious fine wit imaginable.

She is a generous woman, a magnanimous woman; wear her chains and she
will not brain you with her club.  She is the light, the centre of every
society where she appears, like what shall I say?  like the moon in a
bowl of old Rhenish.  And you will drain that bowl to the bottom to seize
her, as it were--catch a correct idea of her; ay, and your brains are
drowned in the attempt.  Yes, Richie; I was aware of your residence at
Riversley.  Were you reminded of your wandering dada on Valentine's day?
Come, my boy, we have each of us a thousand things to relate.  I may be
dull--I do not understand what started you on your journey in search of
me.  An impulse?  An accident?  Say, a directing angel!  We rest our legs
here till evening, and then we sup.  You will be astonished to hear that
you have dined.  'Tis the fashion with the Germans.  I promise you good
wine shall make it up to you for the return to school-habits.  We sup,
and we pack our scanty baggage, and we start tonight.  Brook no insult at
Courts if you are of material value: if not, it is unreservedly a
question whether you like kickings.'

My father paused, yawned and stretched, to be rid of the remainder of his
aches and stiffness.  Out of a great yawn he said:

'Dear lads, I have fallen into the custom of the country; I crave your
permission that I may smoke.  Wander, if you choose, within hail of me,
or sit by me, if you can bear it, and talk of your school-life, and your
studies.  Your aunt Dorothy, Richie?  She is well?  I know not her like.
I could bear to hear of any misfortune but that she suffered pain.

My father smoked his cigar peacefully.  He had laid a guitar on his
knees, and flipped a string, or chafed over all the strings, and plucked
and thrummed them as his mood varied.  We chatted, and watched the going
down of the sun, and amused ourselves idly, fermenting as we were.
Anything that gave pleasure to us two boys pleased and at once occupied
my father.  It was without aid from Temple's growing admiration of him
that I recovered my active belief and vivid delight in his presence.  My
younger days sprang up beside me like brothers.  No one talked, looked,
flashed, frowned, beamed, as he did!  had such prompt liveliness as he!
such tenderness!  No one was ever so versatile in playfulness.  He took
the colour of the spirits of the people about him.  His vivacious or
sedate man-of-the-world tone shifted to playfellow's fun in a twinkling.
I used as a little fellow to think him larger than he really was, but he
was of good size, inclined to be stout; his eyes were grey, rather
prominent, and his forehead sloped from arched eyebrows.  So
conversational were his eyes and brows that he could persuade you to
imagine he was carrying on a dialogue without opening his mouth.  His
voice was charmingly clear; his laughter confident, fresh, catching, the
outburst of his very self, as laughter should be.  Other sounds of
laughter were like echoes.

Strange to say, I lost the links of my familiarity with him when he left
us on a short visit to his trunks and portmanteaux, and had to lean on
Temple, who tickled but rejoiced me by saying: 'Richie, your father is
just the one I should like to be secretary to.'

We thought it a pity to have to leave this nice foreign place
immediately.  I liked the scenery, and the wine, and what I supposed to
be the habit of the gentlemen here to dress in silks.  On my father's
return to us I asked him if we could not stay till morning.

'Till morning, then,' he said: 'and to England with the first lark.'

His complexion was ruddier; his valet had been at work to restore it; he
was getting the sanguine hue which coloured my recollection of him.
Wearing a black velvet cap and a Spanish furred cloak, he led us over the
villa.  In Sarkeld he resided at the palace, and generally at the lake-
palace on the removal of the Court thither.  The margravine had placed
the villa, which was her own property, at his disposal, the better to
work out their conspiracy.

'It would have been mine!' said my father, bending suddenly to my ear,
and humming his philosophical 'heigho,' as he stepped on in minuet
fashion.  We went through apartments rich with gilded oak and pine
panellings: in one was a rough pattern of a wooden horse opposite a
mirror; by no means a figure of a horse, but apparently a number of
pieces contributed by a carpenter's workshop, having a rueful seat in the
middle.  My father had practised the attitude of Prince Albrecht
Wohlgemuth on it.  'She timed me five and twenty minutes there only
yesterday,' he said; and he now supposed he had sat the bronze horse as a
statue in public view exactly thirty-seven minutes and a quarter.  Tubs
full of colouring liquid to soak the garments of the prince, pots of
paint, and paint and plaster brushes, hinted the magnitude of the
preparations.

'Here,' said my father in another apartment, 'I was this morning
apparelled at seven o'clock: and I would have staked my right arm up to
the collar-bone on the success of the undertaking!'

'Weren't they sure to have found it out in the end, papa?' I inquired.

'I am not so certain of that,' he rejoined: 'I cannot quaff consolation
from that source.  I should have been covered up after exhibition; I
should have been pronounced imperfect in my fitting-apparatus; the
sculptor would have claimed me, and I should have been enjoying the
fruits of a brave and harmless conspiracy to do honour to an illustrious
prince, while he would have been moulding and casting an indubitable
bronze statue in my image.  A fig for rumours!  We show ourself; we are
caught from sight; we are again on show.  Now this being successfully
done, do you see, Royalty declines to listen to vulgar tattle.
Presumably, Richie, it was suspected by the Court that the margravine had
many months ago commanded the statue at her own cost, and had set her
mind on winning back the money.  The wonder of it was my magnificent
resemblance to the defunct.  I sat some three hours before the old
warrior's portraits in the dining-saloon of the lake-palace.  Accord me
one good spell of meditation over a tolerable sketch, I warrant myself to
represent him to the life, provided that he was a personage: I incline to
stipulate for handsome as well.  On my word of honour as a man and a
gentleman, I pity the margravine--my poor good Frau Feldmarschall!  Now,
here, Richie,'--my father opened a side-door out of an elegant little
room into a spacious dark place, 'here is her cabinet-theatre, where we
act German and French comediettas in Spring and Autumn.  I have
superintended it during the two or more years of my stay at the Court.
Humph! 'tis over.'

He abruptly closed the door.  His dress belonged to the part of a Spanish
nobleman, personated by him in a Play called The Hidalgo Enraged, he
said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the melancholy door, behind
which gay scenes had sparkled.

'Papa!' said I sadly, for consolation.

'You're change for a sovereign to the amount of four hundred and forty-
nine thousand shillings every time you speak!' cried he, kissing my
forehead.

He sparkled in good earnest on hearing that I had made acquaintance with
the little Princess Ottilia.  What I thought of her, how she looked at
me, what I said to her, what words she answered, how the acquaintance
began, who were observers of it,--I had to repair my omission to mention
her by furnishing a precise description of the circumstances, describing
her face and style, repeating her pretty English.

My father nodded: he thought I exaggerated that foreign English of hers;
but, as I said, I was new to it and noticed it.  He admitted the greater
keenness of attention awakened by novelty.

'Only,' said he, 'I rather wonder--' and here he smiled at me
inquiringly.  ''Tis true,' he added, 'a boy of fourteen or fifteen--
ay, Richie, have your fun out.  A youngster saw the comic side of her.
Do you know, that child has a remarkable character?  Her disposition is
totally unfathomable.  You are a deep reader of English poetry, I hope,;
she adores it, and the English Navy.  She informed me that if she had
been the English people she would have made Nelson king.  The Royal
family of England might see objections to that, I told her.  Cries she:
"Oh! anything for a sea-hero."  You will find these young princes and
princesses astonishingly revolutionary when they entertain brains.  Now
at present, just at present, an English naval officer, and a poet, stand
higher in the esteem of that young Princess Ottilia than dukes, kings, or
emperors.  So you have seen her!' my father ejaculated musingly, and
hummed, and said: 'By the way, we must be careful not to offend our
grandpapa Beltham, Richie.  Good acres--good anchorage; good coffers--
good harbourage.  Regarding poetry, my dear boy, you ought to be writing
it, for I do--the diversion of leisure hours, impromptus.  In poetry, I
would scorn anything but impromptus.  I was saying, Richie, that if
tremendous misfortune withholds from you your legitimate prestige, you
must have the substantial element.  'Tis your springboard to vault by,
and cushions on the other side if you make a miss and fall.  'Tis the
essence if you have not the odour.'

I followed my father's meaning as the shadow of a bird follows it in
sunlight; it made no stronger an impression than a flying shadow on the
grass; still I could verify subsequently that I had penetrated him--I had
caught the outline of his meaning--though I was little accustomed to his
manner of communicating his ideas: I had no notion of what he touched on
with the words, prestige, essence, and odour.

My efforts to gather the reason for his having left me neglected at
school were fruitless.  'Business, business!  sad necessity!  hurry,
worry-the-hounds!' was his nearest approach to an explicit answer; and
seeing I grieved his kind eyes, I abstained.  Nor did I like to defend
Mr. Rippenger for expecting to be paid.  We came to that point once or
twice, when so sharply wronged did he appear, and vehement and indignant,
that I banished thoughts which marred my luxurious contentment in hearing
him talk and sing, and behave in his old ways and new habits.

Plain velvet was his dress at dinner.  We had a yellow Hock.  Temple's
meditative face over it, to discover the margravine, or something, in its
flavour, was a picture.  It was an evening of incessant talking; no
telling of events straightforwardly, but all by fits--all here and there.
My father talked of Turkey, so I learnt he had been in that country;
Temple of the routine of our life at Riversley; I of Kiomi, the gipsy
girl; then we two of Captain Jasper Welsh; my father of the Princess
Ottilia.  When I alluded to the margravine, he had a word to say of Mrs.
Waddy; so I learnt she had been in continual correspondence with him, and
had cried heavily about me, poor soul.  Temple laughed out a recollection
of Captain Bulsted's 'hic, haec, hoc'; I jumped Janet Ilchester up on the
table; my father expatiated on the comfort of a volume of Shakespeare to
an exiled Englishman.  We drank to one another, and heartily to the
statue.  My father related the history of the margravine's plot in duck-
and-drake skips, and backward to his first introduction to her at some
Austrian Baths among the mountains.  She wanted amusement--he provided
it; she never let him quit her sight from that moment.

'And now,' he said, 'she has lost me!' He drew out of his pocket-book a
number of designs for the statue of Prince Albrecht, to which the
margravine's initials were appended, and shuffled them, and sighed, and
said:'Most complete arrangements!  most complete!  No body of men were
ever so well drilled as those fellows up at Bella Vista--could not have
been!  And at the climax, in steps the darling boy for whom I laboured
and sweated, and down we topple incontinently!  Nothing would have shaken
me but the apparition of my son!  I was proof against everything but
that!  I sat invincible for close upon an hour--call it an hour!  Not a
muscle of me moved: I repeat, the heart in my bosom capered like an
independent organ; had it all its own way, leaving me mine, until Mr.
Temple, take my word for it, there is a guiding hand in some families;
believe it, and be serene in adversity.  The change of life at a merry
Court to life in a London alley will exercise our faith.  But the
essential thing is that Richie has been introduced here, and I intend him
to play a part here.  The grandson and heir of one of the richest
commoners in England--I am not saying commoner as a term of reproach--
possessed of a property that turns itself over and doubles itself every
ten years, may--mind you, may--on such a solid foundation as that!--and
as to birth, your Highness has only to grant us a private interview.'

Temple was dazed by this mystifying address to him; nor could I
understand it.

'Why, papa, you always wished for me to go into Parliament,' said I.

'I do,' he replied, 'and I wish you to lead the London great world.  Such
topics are for by-and-by.  Adieu to them!' He kissed his wafting finger-
tips.

We fell upon our random talk again with a merry rattle.

I had to give him a specimen of my piano-playing and singing.

He shook his head.  'The cricketer and the scholar have been developed at
the expense of the musician; and music, Richie, music unlocks the chamber
of satinrose.'

Late at night we separated.  Temple and I slept in companion-rooms.
Deadly drowsy, the dear little fellow sat on the edge of my bed
chattering of his wonder.  My dreams led me wandering with a ship's diver
under the sea, where we walked in a light of pearls and exploded old
wrecks.  I was assuring the glassy man that it was almost as clear
beneath the waves as above, when I awoke to see my father standing over
me in daylight; and in an ecstasy I burst into sobs.

'Here, Richie'--he pressed fresh violets on my nostrils-- 'you have had a
morning visitor.  Quick out of bed, and you will see the little fairy
crossing the meadow.'

I leapt to the window in time to have in view the little Princess
Ottilia, followed by her faithful gaunt groom, before she was lost in the
shadow of the fir-trees.

Chapter XIX

Our return Homeward



We started for England at noon, much against my secret wishes; but my
father would not afford the margravine time to repent of her violent
language and injustice toward him.  Reflection increased his indignation.
Anything that went wrong on the first stages of the journey caused him to
recapitulate her epithets and reply to them proudly.  He confided to me
in Cologne Cathedral that the entire course of his life was a grand plot,
resembling an unfinished piece of architecture, which might, at a future
day, prove the wonder of the world: and he had, therefore, packed two
dozen of hoar old (uralt: he used comical German) Hock for a present to
my grandfather Beltham, in the hope of its being found acceptable.

'For, Richie,' said he, 'you may not know--and it is not to win your
thanks I inform you of it--that I labour unremittingly in my son's
interests.  I have established him, on his majority, in Germany, at a
Court.  My object now is to establish him in England.  Promise me that it
shall be the decided endeavour of your energies and talents to rise to
the height I point out to you?  You promise, I perceive,' he added, sharp
in detecting the unpleasant predicament of a boy who is asked to speak
priggishly.  So then I could easily promise with a firm voice.  He
dropped certain explosive hints, which reminded me of the funny ideas of
my state and greatness I had when a child.  I shrugged at them; I cared
nothing for revelations to come by-and-by.  My object was to unite my
father and grandfather on terms of friendship.

This was the view that now absorbed and fixed my mind.  To have him a
frequent visitor at Riversley, if not a resident in the house, enlivening
them all, while I, perhaps, trifled a cavalry sabre, became one of my
settled dreams.  The difficult part of the scheme appeared to me the
obtaining of my father's consent.  I mentioned it, and he said
immediately that he must have his freedom.  'Now, for instance,' said he,
'what is my desire at this moment?  I have always a big one perched on a
rock in the distance; but I speak of my present desire.  And let it be
supposed that the squire is one of us: we are returning to England.
Well, I want to show you a stork's nest.  We are not far enough South for
the stork to build here.  It is a fact, Richie, that I do want to show
you the bird for luck, and as a feature of the country.  And in me, a
desire to do a thing partakes of the impetus of steam.

Well, you see we are jogging home to England.  I resist myself for duty's
sake: that I can do.  But if the squire were here with his yea and his
nay, by heavens!  I should be off to the top of the Rhine like a tornado.
I submit to circumstances: I cannot, and I will not, be dictated to by
men.'

'That seems to me rather unreasonable,' I remonstrated.

'It is; I am ashamed of it,' he answered.  'Do as you will, Richie; set
me down at Riversley, but under no slight, mark you.  I keep my honour
intact, like a bottled cordial; my unfailing comfort in adversity!  I
hand it to you, my son, on my death-bed, and say, "You have there the
essence of my life.  Never has it been known of me that I swallowed an
insult."'

'Then, papa, I shall have a talk with the squire.'

'Make good your ground in the castle,' said he.  'I string a guitar
outside.  You toss me a key from the walls.  If there is room, and I have
leisure, I enter.  If not, you know I am paving your way in other
quarters.  Riversley, my boy, is an excellent foothold and fortress:
Riversley is not the world.  At Riversley I should have to wear a double
face, and, egad!  a double stomach-bag, like young Jack feeding with the
giant--one full of ambition, the other of provender.  That place is our
touchstone to discover whether we have prudence.  We have, I hope.  And
we will have, Mr. Temple, a pleasant day or two in Paris.'

It was his habit to turn off the bent of these conversations by drawing
Temple into them.  Temple declared there was no feeling we were in a
foreign country while he was our companion.  We simply enjoyed strange
scenes, looking idly out of our windows.  Our recollection of the
strangest scene ever witnessed filled us with I know not what scornful
pleasure, and laughed in the background at any sight or marvel pretending
to amuse us.  Temple and I cantered over the great Belgian battlefield,
talking of Bella Vista tower, the statue, the margravine, our sour milk
and black-bread breakfast, the little Princess Ottilia, with her 'It is
my question,' and 'You were kind to my lambs, sir,' thoughtless of glory
and dead bones.  My father was very differently impressed.  He was in an
exultant glow, far outmatching the bloom on our faces when we rejoined
him.  I cried,

'Papa, if the prince won't pay for a real statue, I will, and I'll
present it in your name!'

'To the nation?' cried he, staring, and arresting his arm in what seemed
an orchestral movement.

'To the margravine !'

He heard, but had to gather his memory.  He had been fighting the battle,
and made light of Bella Vista.  I found that incidents over which a day
or two had rolled lost their features to him.  He never smiled at
recollections.  If they were forced on him noisily by persons he liked,
perhaps his face was gay, but only for a moment.  The gaiety of his
nature drew itself from hot-springs of hopefulness: our arrival in
England, our interviews there, my majority Burgundy, my revisitation of
Germany--these events to come gave him the aspect children wear out a-
Maying or in an orchard.  He discussed the circumstances connected with
the statue as dry matter-of-fact, and unless it was his duty to be
hilarious at the dinner-table, he was hardly able to respond to a call on
his past life and mine.  His future, too, was present tense: 'We do
this,' not 'we will do this'; so that, generally, no sooner did we speak
of an anticipated scene than he was acting in it.  I studied him eagerly,
I know, and yet quite unconsciously, and I came to no conclusions.  Boys
are always putting down the ciphers of their observations of people
beloved by them, but do not add up a sum total.

Our journey home occupied nearly eleven weeks, owing to stress of money
on two occasions.  In Brussels I beheld him with a little beggar-girl in
his arms.

'She has asked me for a copper coin, Richie,' he said, squeezing her fat
cheeks to make cherries of her lips.

I recommended him to give her a silver one.

'Something, Richie, I must give the little wench, for I have kissed her,
and, in my list of equivalents, gold would be the sole form of repayment
after that.  You must buy me off with honour, my boy.'

I was compelled to receive a dab from the child's nose, by way of a kiss,
in return for buying him off with honour.

The child stumped away on the pavement fronting our hotel, staring at its
fist that held the treasure.

'Poor pet wee drab of it!' exclaimed my father.  'One is glad, Richie, to
fill a creature out of one's emptiness.  Now she toddles; she is
digesting it rapidly.  The last performance of one's purse is rarely so
pleasant as that.  I owe it to her that I made the discovery in time.'

In this manner I also made the discovery that my father had no further
supply of money, none whatever.  How it had run out without his remarking
it, he could not tell; he could only assure me that he had become aware
of the fact while searching vainly for a coin to bestow on the beggar-
girl.  I despatched a letter attested by a notary of the city, applying
for money to the banker to whom Colonel Goodwin had introduced me on my
arrival on the Continent.  The money came, and in the meantime we had
formed acquaintances and entertained them; they were chiefly half-pay
English military officers, dashing men.  One, a Major Dykes, my father
established in our hotel, and we carried him on to Paris, where,
consequent upon our hospitalities, the purse was again deficient.

Two reasons for not regretting it were adduced by my father; firstly,
that it taught me not to despise the importance of possessing money;
secondly, that we had served our country by assisting Dykes, who was on
the scent of a new and terrible weapon of destruction, which he believed
to be in the hands of the French Government.  Major Dykes disappeared on
the scent, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that we had done our
best toward saving the Navy of Great Britain from being blown out of
water.  Temple and I laughed over Major Dykes, and he became our puppet
for by-play, on account of his enormous whiskers, his passion for strong
drinks, and his air of secresy.  My father's faith in his patriotic
devotedness was sufficient to withhold me from suspicions of his
character.  Whenever my instinct, or common sense, would have led me to
differ with my father in opinion fun supervened; I was willing that
everything in the world should be as he would have it be, and took up
with a spirit of laughter, too happy in having won him, in having fished
him out of the deep sea at one fling of the net, as he said, to care for
accuracy of sentiment in any other particular.

Our purse was at its lowest ebb; he suggested no means of replenishing
it, and I thought of none.  He had heard that it was possible to live in
Paris upon next to nothing with very great luxury, so we tried it; we
strolled through the lilac aisles among bonnes and babies, attended
military spectacles, rode on omnibuses, dined on the country heights,
went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere
front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would
have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical
influence of my father's address, a mixture of the ceremonious and the
affable such as the people could not withstand.

'The poet is perhaps, on the whole, more exhilarating than the alderman,'
he said.

These were the respective names given by him to the empty purse and the
full purse.  We vowed we preferred the poet.

'Ay,' said he, 'but for all that the alderman is lighter on his feet: I
back him to be across the Channel first.  The object of my instructions
to you will be lost, Richie, if I find you despising the Alderman's
Pegasus.  On money you mount.  We are literally chained here, you know,
there is no doubt about it; and we are adding a nail to our fetters
daily.  True, you are accomplishing the Parisian accent.  Paris has also
this immense advantage over all other cities: 'tis the central hotel on
the high-road of civilization.  In Paris you meet your friends to a
certainty; it catches them every one in turn; so now we must abroad early
and late, and cut for trumps.'  A meeting with a friend of my father,
Mr. Monterez Williams, was the result of our resolute adoption of this
system.  He helped us on to Boulogne, where my father met another friend,
to whom he gave so sumptuous a dinner that we had not money enough to pay
the hotel bill.

'Now observe the inconvenience of leaving Paris,' said he.  'Ten to one
we shall have to return.  We will try a week's whistling on the jetty;
and if no luck comes, and you will admit, Richie--Mr. Temple, I call your
attention to it--that luck will scarcely come in profuse expedition
through the narrow neck of a solitary seaport, why, we must return to
Paris.'

I proposed to write to my aunt Dorothy for money, but he would not hear
of that.  After two or three days of whistling, I saw my old friend, Mr.
Bannerbridge, step out of the packetboat.  On condition of my writing to
my aunt to say that I was coming home, he advanced me the sum we were in
need of, grudgingly though, and with the prediction that we should break
down again, which was verified.  It occurred only a stage from Riversley,
where my grandfather's name was good as coin of the realm.  Besides, my
father remained at the inn to guarantee the payment of the bill, while
Temple and I pushed on in a fly with the two dozen of Hock.  It could
hardly be called a break-down, but my father was not unwilling for me to
regard it in that light.  Among his parting remarks was an impressive
adjuration to me to cultivate the squire's attachment at all costs.

'Do this,' he said, 'and I shall know that the lesson I have taught you
on your journey homeward has not been thrown away.  My darling boy!  my
curse through life has been that the sense of weight in money is a sense
I am and was born utterly a stranger to.  The consequence is, my grandest
edifices fall; there is no foundation for them.  Not that I am worse,
understand me, than under a temporary cloud, and the blessing of heaven
has endowed me with a magnificent constitution.  Heaven forefend that I
should groan for myself, or you for me!  But digest what you have learnt,
Richie; press nothing on the squire; be guided by the advice of that
esteemed and admirable woman, your aunt Dorothy.  And, by the way, you
may tell her confidentially of the progress of your friendship with the
Princess Ottilia.  Here I shall employ my hours in a tranquil study of
nature until I see you.'  Thus he sped me forward.

We sighted Riversley about mid-day on a sunny June morning.  Compared
with the view from Bella Vista, our firs looked scanty, our heath-tracts
dull, as places having no page of history written on them, our fresh
green meadows not more than commonly homely.  I was so full of my sense
of triumph in my adventurous journey and the recovery of my father, that
I gazed on the old Grange from a towering height.  The squire was on the
lawn, surrounded by a full company: the Ilchesters, the Ambroses, the
Wilfords, Captain and Squire Gregory Bulsted, the Rubreys, and others,
all bending to roses, to admire, smell, or pluck.  Charming groups of
ladies were here and there; and Temple whispered as we passed them:

'We beat foreigners in our women, Richie.'

I, making it my business to talk with perfect unconcern, replied

'Do you think so?  Perhaps.  Not in all cases'; all the while I was
exulting at the sweet beams of England radiating from these dear early-
morning-looking women.

My aunt Dorothy swam up to me, and, kissing me, murmured:

'Take no rebuff from your grandpapa, darling.'

My answer was: 'I have found him!'

Captain Bulsted sang out our names; I caught sight of Julia Rippenger's
face; the squire had his back turned to me, which reminded me of my first
speech with Captain Jasper Welsh, and I thought to myself, I know
something of the world now, and the thing is to keep a good temper.  Here
there was no wire-coil to intercept us, so I fronted him quickly.

'Hulloa!' he cried, and gave me his shoulder.

'Temple is your guest, sir,' said I.

He was obliged to stretch out his hand to Temple.

A prompt instinct warned me that I must show him as much Beltham as I
could summon.

'Dogs and horses all right, sir?' I asked.

Captain Bulsted sauntered near.

'Here, William,' said the squire, 'tell this fellow about my stables.'

'In excellent condition, Harry Richmond,' returned the captain.

'Oh!  he 's got a new name, I 'll swear,' said the squire.

'Not I !'

'Then what have you got of your trip, eh?'

'A sharper eye than I had, sir.'

'You've been sharpening it in London, have you?'

'I've been a little farther than London, squire.'

'Well, you're not a liar.'

'There, you see the lad can stand fire!'  Captain Bulsted broke in.
'Harry Richmond, I'm proud to shake your hand, but I'll wait till you're
through the ceremony with your grandad.'

The squire's hands were crossed behind him.  I smiled boldly in his face.

'Shall I make the tour of you to get hold of one of them, sir?'  He
frowned and blinked.

'Shuffle in among the ladies; you seem to know how to make friends among
them,' he said, and pretended to disengage his right hand for the purpose
of waving it toward one of the groups.

I seized it, saying heartily, 'Grandfather, upon my honour, I love you,
and I'm glad to be home again.'

'Mind you, you're not at home till you've begged Uberly's pardon in
public, you know what for,' he rejoined.

'Leaving the horse at that inn is on my conscience,' said I.

The squire grumbled a bit.

'Suppose he kicks?' said I; and the captain laughed, and the squire too,
and I was in such high spirits I thought of a dozen witty suggestions
relative to the seat of the conscience, and grieved for a minute at going
to the ladies.

All the better; keep him there Captain Bulsted convoyed me to pretty
Irish-eyed Julia Rippenger.  Temple had previously made discovery of
Janet Ilchester.  Relating our adventures on different parts of the lawn,
we both heard that Colonel Goodwin and his daughter had journeyed down to
Riversley to smooth the way for my return; so my easy conquest of the
squire was not at all wonderful; nevertheless, I maintained my sense of
triumph, and was assured in my secret heart that I had a singular
masterfulness, and could, when I chose to put it forth, compel my
grandfather to hold out his hand to my father as he had done to me.

Julia Rippenger was a guest at Riversley through.  a visit paid to her by
my aunt Dorothy in alarm at my absence.  The intention was to cause the
squire a distraction.  It succeeded; for the old man needed lively
prattle of a less childish sort than Janet Ilchester's at his elbow, and
that young lady, though true enough in her fashion, was the ardent friend
of none but flourishing heads; whereas Julia, finding my name under a
cloud at Riversley, spoke of me, I was led to imagine by Captain Bulsted,
as a ballad hero, a gloriful fellow, a darling whose deeds were all
pardonable--a mere puff of smoke in the splendour of his nature.

'To hear the young lady allude to me in that style!' he confided to my
ear, with an ineffable heave of his big chest.

Certain good influences, at any rate, preserved the squire from
threatening to disinherit me.  Colonel Goodwin had spoken to him very
manfully and wisely as to my relations with my father.  The squire, it
was assumed by my aunt, and by Captain Bulsted and Julia, had undertaken
to wink at my father's claims on my affection.  All three vehemently
entreated me to make no mention of the present of Hock to him, and not to
attempt to bring about an interview.  Concerning the yellow wine I
disregarded their advice, for I held it to be a point of filial duty,
and an obligation religiously contracted beneath a cathedral dome; so I
performed the task of offering the Hock, stating that it was of ancient
birth.  The squire bunched his features; he tutored his temper, and said
not a word.  I fancied all was well.  Before I tried the second step,
Captain Bulsted rode over to my father, who himself generously enjoined
the prudent course, in accordance with his aforegone precepts.  He was
floated off, as he termed it, from the inn where he lay stranded, to
London, by I knew not what heaven-sent gift of money, bidding me keep in
view the grand career I was to commence at Dipwell on arriving at my
majority.  I would have gone with him had he beckoned a finger.  The
four-and-twenty bottles of Hock were ranged in a line for the stable-boys
to cock-shy at them under the squire's supervision and my enforced
attendance, just as revolutionary criminals are executed.  I felt like
the survivor of friends, who had seen their blood flow.

He handed me a cheque for the payment of debts incurred in my recent
adventures.  Who could help being grateful for it?  And yet his
remorseless spilling of the kindly wine full of mellow recollections of
my father and the little princess, drove the sense of gratitude out of
me.