Evan Harrington. Complete. George Meredith
the arm of a mourner about to be experimental on Kilne’s port—
‘I think we had better wait till young Mr. Harrington takes the table, don’t you see?’
‘Yes,-ah!’ croaked Goren. ‘The head of the family, as the saying goes!’
‘I suppose we shan’t go into business to-day?’ Joyce carelessly observed.
Lawyer Perkins answered:
‘No. You can’t expect it. Mr. Harrington has led me to anticipate that he will appoint a day. Don’t you see?’
‘Oh! I see,’ returned Joyce. ‘I ain’t in such a hurry. What’s he doing?’
Doubleday, whose propensities were waggish, suggested ‘shaving,’ but half ashamed of it, since the joke missed, fell to as if he were soaping his face, and had some trouble to contract his jaw.
The delay in Evan’s attendance on the guests of the house was caused by the fact that Mrs. Mel had lain in wait for him descending, to warn him that he must treat them with no supercilious civility, and to tell him partly the reason why. On hearing the potential relations in which they stood toward the estate of his father, Evan hastily and with the assurance of a son of fortune, said they should be paid.
‘That’s what they would like to hear,’ said Mrs. Mel. ‘You may just mention it when they’re going to leave. Say you will fix a day to meet them.’
‘Every farthing!’ pursued Evan, on whom the tidings were beginning to operate. ‘What! debts? my poor father!’
‘And a thumping sum, Van. You will open your eyes wider.’
‘But it shall be paid, mother,—it shall be paid. Debts? I hate them. I’d slave night and day to pay them.’
Mrs. Mel spoke in a more positive tense: ‘And so will I, Van. Now, go.’
It mattered little to her what sort of effect on his demeanour her revelation produced, so long as the resolve she sought to bring him to was nailed in his mind; and she was a woman to knock and knock again, till it was firmly fixed there. With a strong purpose, and no plans, there were few who could resist what, in her circle, she willed; not even a youth who would gaily have marched to the scaffold rather than stand behind a counter. A purpose wedded to plans may easily suffer shipwreck; but an unfettered purpose that moulds circumstances as they arise, masters us, and is terrible. Character melts to it, like metal in the steady furnace. The projector of plots is but a miserable gambler and votary of chances. Of a far higher quality is the will that can subdue itself to wait, and lay no petty traps for opportunity. Poets may fable of such a will, that it makes the very heavens conform to it; or, I may add, what is almost equal thereto, one who would be a gentleman, to consent to be a tailor. The only person who ever held in his course against Mrs. Mel, was Mel,—her husband; but, with him, she was under the physical fascination of her youth, and it never left her. In her heart she barely blamed him. What he did, she took among other inevitable matters.
The door closed upon Evan, and waiting at the foot, of the stairs a minute to hear how he was received, Mrs. Mel went to the kitchen and called the name of Dandy, which brought out an ill-built, low-browed, small man, in a baggy suit of black, who hopped up to her with a surly salute. Dandy was a bird Mrs. Mel had herself brought down, and she had for him something of a sportsman’s regard for his victim. Dandy was the cleaner of boots and runner of errands in the household of Melchisedec, having originally entered it on a dark night by the cellar. Mrs. Mel, on that occasion, was sleeping in her dressing-gown, to be ready to give the gallant night-hawk, her husband, the service he might require on his return to the nest. Hearing a suspicious noise below, she rose, and deliberately loaded a pair of horse-pistols, weapons Mel had worn in his holsters in the heroic days gone; and with these she stepped downstairs straight to the cellar, carrying a lantern at her girdle. She could not only load, but present and fire. Dandy was foremost in stating that she called him forth steadily, three times, before the pistol was discharged. He admitted that he was frightened, and incapable of speech, at the apparition of the tall, terrific woman. After the third time of asking he had the ball lodged in his leg and fell. Mrs. Mel was in the habit of bearing heavier weights than Dandy. She made no ado about lugging him to a chamber, where, with her own hands (for this woman had some slight knowledge of surgery, and was great in herbs and drugs) she dressed his wound, and put him to bed; crying contempt (ever present in Dandy’s memory) at such a poor creature undertaking the work of housebreaker. Taught that he really was a poor creature for the work, Dandy, his nursing over, begged to be allowed to stop and wait on Mrs. Mel; and she who had, like many strong natures, a share of pity for the objects she despised, did not cast him out. A jerk in his gait, owing to the bit of lead Mrs. Mel had dropped into him, and a little, perhaps, to her self-satisfied essay in surgical science on his person, earned him the name he went by.
When her neighbours remonstrated with her for housing a reprobate, Mrs. Mel would say: ‘Dandy is well-fed and well-physicked: there’s no harm in Dandy’; by which she may have meant that the food won his gratitude, and the physic reduced his humours. She had observed human nature. At any rate, Dandy was her creature; and the great Mel himself rallied her about her squire.
‘When were you drunk last?’ was Mrs. Mel’s address to Dandy, as he stood waiting for orders.
He replied to it in an altogether injured way:
‘There, now; you’ve been and called me away from my dinner to ask me that. Why, when I had the last chance, to be sure.’
‘And you were at dinner in your new black suit?’
‘Well,’ growled Dandy, ‘I borrowed Sally’s apron. Seems I can’t please ye.’
Mrs. Mel neither enjoined nor cared for outward forms of respect, where she was sure of complete subserviency. If Dandy went beyond the limits, she gave him an extra dose. Up to the limits he might talk as he pleased, in accordance with Mrs. Mel’s maxim, that it was a necessary relief to all talking creatures.
‘Now, take off your apron,’ she said, ‘and wash your hands, dirty pig, and go and wait at table in there’; she pointed to the parlour-door: ‘Come straight to me when everybody has left.’
‘Well, there I am with the bottles again,’ returned Dandy. ‘It ‘s your fault this time, mind! I’ll come as straight as I can.’
Dandy turned away to perform her bidding, and Mrs. Mel ascended to the drawing-room to sit with Mrs. Wishaw, who was, as she told all who chose to hear, an old flame of Mel’s, and was besides, what Mrs. Mel thought more of, the wife of Mel’s principal creditor, a wholesale dealer in cloth, resident in London.
The conviviality of the mourners did not disturb the house. Still, men who are not accustomed to see the colour of wine every day, will sit and enjoy it, even upon solemn occasions, and the longer they sit the more they forget the matter that has brought them together. Pleading their wives and shops, however, they released Evan from his miserable office late in the afternoon.
His mother came down to him,—and saying, ‘I see how you did the journey—you walked it,’ told him to follow her.
‘Yes, mother,’ Evan yawned, ‘I walked part of the way. I met a fellow in a gig about ten miles out of Fallow field, and he gave me a lift to Flatsham. I just reached Lymport in time, thank Heaven! I wouldn’t have missed that! By the way, I’ve satisfied these men.’
‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Mel.
‘They wanted—one or two of them—what a penance it is to have to sit among those people an hour!—they wanted to ask me about the business, but I silenced them. I told them to meet me here this day week.’
Mrs. Mel again said ‘Oh!’ and, pushing into one of the upper rooms, ‘Here’s your bedroom, Van, just as you left it.’
‘Ah, so it is,’ muttered Evan, eyeing a print. ‘The Douglas and the Percy: “he took the dead man by the hand.” What an age it seems since I last saw that. There’s Sir Hugh Montgomery on horseback—he hasn’t moved. Don’t you remember my father calling it the Battle of Tit-for-Tat? Gallant Percy! I know he wished he had lived in those days of knights and battles.’
‘It