The Essential George Meredith Collection. George Meredith
when Richard, inarticulate at first in his haste, cried out, "My dear, dear father! You are safe! I feared--You are better, sir? Thank God!" Sir Austin stood away from him.
"Safe?" he said. "What has alarmed you?"
Instead of replying, Richard dropped into a chair, and seized his hand and kissed it.
Sir Austin took a seat, and waited for his son to explain.
"Those doctors are such fools!" Richard broke out. "I was sure they were wrong. They don't know headache from apoplexy. It's worth the ride, sir, to see you. You left Raynham so suddenly.--But you are well! It was not an attack of real apoplexy?"
His father's brows contorted, and he said, No, it was not. Richard pursued:
"If you were ill, I couldn't come too soon, though, if coroners' inquests sat on horses, those doctors would be found guilty of mare-slaughter. Cassandra'll be knocked up. I was too early for the train at Bellingham, and I wouldn't wait. She did the distance in four hours and three-quarters. Pretty good, sir, wasn't it?"
"It has given you appetite for dinner, I hope," said the baronet, not so well pleased to find that it was not simple obedience that had brought the youth to him in such haste.
"I'm ready," replied Richard. "I shall be in time to return by the last train to-night. I will leave Cassandra in your charge for a rest."
His father quietly helped him to soup, which he commenced gobbling with an eagerness that might pass for appetite.
"All well at Raynham?" said the baronet.
"Quite, sir."
"Nothing new?"
"Nothing, sir."
"The same as when I left?"
"No change whatever!"
"I shall be glad to get back to the old place," said the baronet. "My stay in town has certainly been profitable. I have made some pleasant acquaintances who may probably favour us with a visit there in the late autumn--people you may be pleased to know. They are very anxious to see Raynham."
"I love the old place," cried Richard. "I never wish to leave it."
"Why, boy, before I left you were constantly begging to see town."
"Was I, sir? How odd! Well! I don't want to remain here. I've seen enough of it."
"How did you find your way to me?"
Richard laughed, and related his bewilderment at the miles of brick, and the noise, and the troops of people, concluding, "There's no place like home!"
The baronet watched his symptomatic brilliant eyes, and favoured him with a double-dealing sentence--
"To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half traversed the world, is youth's foolishness, my son. Reverence time! A better maxim that than your Horatian."
"He knows all!" thought Richard, and instantly drew away leagues from his father, and threw up fortifications round his love and himself.
Dinner over, Richard looked hurriedly at his watch, and said, with much briskness, "I shall just be in time, sir, if we walk. Will you come with me to the station?"
The baronet did not answer.
Richard was going to repeat the question, but found his father's eyes fixed on him so meaningly that he wavered, and played with his empty glass.
"I think we will have a little more claret," said the baronet.
Claret was brought, and they were left alone.
The baronet then drew within arm's-reach of his son, and began:
"I am not aware what you may have thought of me, Richard, during the years we have lived together; and indeed I have never been in a hurry to be known to you; and, if I had died before my work was done, I should not have complained at losing half my reward, in hearing you thank me. Perhaps, as it is, I never may. Everything, save selfishness, has its recompense. I shall be content if you prosper."
He fetched a breath and continued: "You had in your infancy a great loss." Father and son coloured simultaneously. "To make that good to you I chose to isolate myself from the world, and devote myself entirely to your welfare; and I think it is not vanity that tells me now that the son I have reared is one of the most hopeful of God's creatures. But for that very reason you are open to be tempted the most, and to sink the deepest. It was the first of the angels who made the road to hell."
He paused again. Richard fingered at his watch.
"In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood. We go to wreck very easily. It sounds like superstition; I cannot but think we are tried as most men are not. I see it in us all. And you, my son, are compounded of two races. Your passions are violent. You have had a taste of revenge. You have seen, in a small way, that the pound of flesh draws rivers of blood. But there is now in you another power. You are mounting to the table-land of life, where mimic battles are changed to real ones. And you come upon it laden equally with force to create and to destroy." He deliberated to announce the intelligence, with deep meaning: "There are women in the world, my son!"
The young man's heart galloped back to Raynham.
"It is when you encounter them that you are thoroughly on trial. It is when you know them that life is either a mockery to you, or, as some find it, a gift of blessedness. They are our ordeal. Love of any human object is the soul's ordeal; and they are ours, loving them, or not."
The young man heard the whistle of the train. He saw the moon-lighted wood, and the vision of his beloved. He could barely hold himself down and listen.
"I believe," the baronet spoke with little of the cheerfulness of belief, "good women exist."
Oh, if he knew Lucy!
"But," and he gazed on Richard intently, "it is given to very few to meet them on the threshold--I may say, to none. We find them after hard buffeting, and usually, when we find the one fitted for us, our madness has misshaped our destiny, our lot is cast. For women are not the end, but the means, of life. In youth we think them the former, and thousands, who have not even the excuse of youth, select a mate--or worse--with that sole view. I believe women punish us for so perverting their uses. They punish Society."
The baronet put his hand to his brow as his mind travelled into consequences.
'Our most diligent pupil learns not so much as an earnest teacher,' says The Pilgrim's Scrip; and Sir Austin, in schooling himself to speak with moderation of women, was beginning to get a glimpse of their side of the case.
Cold Blood now touched on love to Hot Blood.
Cold Blood said, "It is a passion coming in the order of nature, the ripe fruit of our animal being."
Hot Blood felt: "It is a divinity! All that is worth living for in the world."
Cold Blood said: "It is a fever which tests our strength, and too often leads to perdition."
Hot Blood felt: "Lead whither it will, I follow it."
Cold Blood said: "It is a name men and women are much in the habit of employing to sanctify their appetites."
Hot Blood felt: "It is worship; religion; life!"
And so the two parallel lines ran on.
The baronet became more personal:
"You know my love for you, my son. The extent of it you cannot know; but you must know that it is something very deep, and--I do not wish to speak of it--but a father must sometimes petition for gratitude, since the only true expression of it is his son's moral good. If