"Or accommodating the beloved object with a lock of his hair," said Wagg.
"Stuff," said the great man. "He has relations in the country, hasn't he? He said something about a nephew, whose interest could return a member. It is the nephew's affair, depend on it. The young one is in a scrape. I was myself--when I was in the fifth form at Eton--a market-gardener's daughter--and swore I'd marry her. I was mad about her--poor Polly!"--Here he made a pause, and perhaps the past rose up to Lord Steyne, and George Gaunt was a boy again, not altogether lost.--"But I say, she must be a fine woman from Pendennis's account.
Have in Dolphin, and let us hear if he knows any thing of her."
At this Wenham sprang out of the box, passed the servitor who waited at the door communicating with the stage, and who saluted Mr. Wenham with profound respect; and the latter emissary, pushing on, and familiar with the place, had no difficulty in finding out the manager, who was employed, as he not unfrequently was, in swearing and cursing the ladies of the corps-de-ballet for not doing their duty.
[Illustration]
The oaths died away on Mr. Dolphin's lips, as soon as he saw Mr. Wenham: and he drew off the hand which was clenched in the face of one of the offending Coryphees, to grasp that of the new comer. "How do, Mr. Wenham?
How's his lordship to-night? Looks uncommonly well," said the manager smiling, as if he had never been out of temper in his life; and he was only too delighted to follow Lord Steyne's embassador, and pay his personal respects to that great man.
The visit to Chatteries was the result of their conversation: and Mr.
Dolphin wrote to his lordship from that place, and did himself the honor to inform the Marquess of Steyne, that he had seen the lady about whom his lordship had spoken, that he was as much struck by her talents as he was by her personal appearance, and that he had made an engagement with Miss Fotheringay who would soon have the honor of appearing before a London audience, and his noble and enlightened patron the Marquess of Steyne.
Pen read the announcement of Miss Fotheringay's engagement in the Chatteries paper, where he had so often praised her charms. The editor made very handsome mention of her talent and beauty, and prophesied her success in the metropolis. Bingley, the manager, began to advertise "The last night of Miss Fotheringay's engagement." Poor Pen and Sir Derby Oaks were very constant at the play: Sir Derby in the stage-box, throwing bouquets and getting glances.--Pen in the almost deserted boxes, haggard, wretched, and lonely. Nobody cared whether Miss Fotheringay was going or staying except those two--and perhaps one more, which was Mr. Bows of the orchestra.
He came out of his place one night, and went into the house to the box where Pen was; and he held out his hand to him, and asked him to come and walk. They walked down the street together: and went and sate upon Chatteries bridge in the moonlight, and talked about _her_. "We may sit on the same bridge," said he: "we have been in the same boat for a long time. You are not the only man who has made a fool of himself about that woman. And I have less excuse than you, because I'm older and know her better. She has no more heart than the stone you are leaning on; and it or you or I might fall into the water, and never come up again, and she wouldn't care. Yes--she would care for me, because she wants me to teach her; and she won't be able to get on without me, and will be forced to send for me from London. But she wouldn't if she didn't want me. She has no heart and no head, and no sense, and no feelings, and no griefs or cares, whatever. I was going to say no pleasures--but the fact is, she does like her dinner, and she is pleased when people admire her."
"And you do?" said Pen, interested out of himself, and wondering at the crabbed, homely little old man.
"It's a habit, like taking snuff, or drinking drams," said the other, "I've been taking her these five years, and can't do without, her. It was I made her. If she doesn't send for me, I shall follow her: but I know she'll send for me. She wants me. Same day she'll marry, and fling me over, as I do the end of this cigar."
The little flaming spark dropped into the water below, and disappeared; and Pen, as he rode home that night, actually thought about somebody but himself.
CHAPTER XV.
THE HAPPY VILLAGE.
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Until the enemy had retired altogether from before the place, Major Pendennis was resolved to keep his garrison in Fairoaks. He did not appear to watch Pen's behavior or to put any restraint on his nephew's actions, but he managed nevertheless to keep the lad constantly under his eye or those of his agents, and young Arthur's comings and goings were quite well known to his vigilant guardian.
I suppose there is scarcely any man who reads this or any other novel but has been balked in love sometime or other, by fate, and circumstance, by the falsehood of woman, or his own fault. Let that worthy friend recall his own sensations under the circumstances, and apply them as illustrative of Mr. Pen's anguish. Ah! what weary nights and sickening fevers! Ah! what mad desires dashing up against some rock of obstruction or indifference, and flung back again from the unimpressionable granite! If a list could be made this very night in London of the groans, thoughts, imprecations of tossing lovers, what a catalogue it would be! I wonder what a per centage of the male population of the metropolis will be lying awake at two or three o'clock to-morrow morning, counting the hours as they go by knelling drearily, and rolling from left to right, restless, yearning, and heart-sick?
What a pang it is! I never knew a man die of love, certainly, but I have known a twelve stone man go down to nine stone five, under a disappointed passion, so that pretty nearly a quarter of him may be said to have perished; and that is no small portion. He has come back to his old size subsequently; perhaps is bigger than ever: very likely some new affection has closed round his heart and ribs and made them comfortable, and young Pen is a man who will console himself like the rest of us. We say this lest the ladies should be disposed to deplore him prematurely, or be seriously uneasy with regard to his complaint. His mother was, but what will not a maternal fondness fear or invent? "Depend on it, my dear creature," Major Pendennis would say gallantly to her, "the boy will recover. As soon as we get her out of the country we will take him somewhere, and show him a little life. Meantime make yourself easy about him. Half a fellow's pangs at losing a woman result from vanity more than affection. To be left by a woman is the deuce and all, to be sure; but look how easily we leave 'em."
Mrs. Pendennis did not know. This sort of knowledge had by no means come within the simple lady's scope. Indeed she did not like the subject or to talk of it: her heart had had its own little private misadventure and she had borne up against it and cured it; and perhaps she had not much patience with other folks' passions, except, of course, Arthur's whose sufferings she made her own, feeling indeed, very likely, in many of the boy's illnesses and pains a great deal more than Pen himself endured.
And she watched him through this present grief with a jealous silent sympathy; although, as we have said, he did not talk to her of his unfortunate condition.
The major must be allowed to have had not a little merit and forbearance, and to have exhibited a highly creditable degree of family affection. The life at Fairoaks was uncommonly dull to a man who had the _entree_ of half the houses in London, and was in the habit of making his bow in three or four drawing-rooms of a night. A dinner with Doctor Portman or a neighboring squire now and then; a dreary rubber at backgammon with the widow, who did her utmost to amuse him: these were the chief of his pleasures. He used to long for the arrival of the bag with the letters, and he read every word of the evening paper. He doctored himself too, assiduously--a course of quiet living would suit him well, he thought, after the London banquets. He dressed himself laboriously every morning and afternoon: he took regular exercise up and down the terrace walk. Thus with his cane, his toilet, his medicine-chest, his backgammon-box, and his newspaper, this worthy and worldly philosopher fenced himself against ennui; and if he did not improve each shining hour, like the bees by the widow's garden wall, Major Pendennis made one hour after another pass as he could: and rendered his captivity just tolerable. After this period it was remarked that he was fond of bringing round the conversation to the American war, the massacre of Wyoming and the brilliant actions of Saint Lucie the fact being that he had a couple of volumes of the "Annual Register" in his bed-room, which he sedulously studied. It is thus a well-regulated man will accommodate himself to circumstances, and show himself calmly superior to fortune.
Pen sometimes took the box at backgammon of a night, or would listen to his mother's simple music of summer evenings--but he was very restless and wretched in spite of all; and has been known to be up before the early daylight even: and down at a carp-pond in Clavering Park, a dreary pool with innumerable-whispering rushes and green alders, where a milkmaid drowned herself in the baronet's grandfather's time, and her ghost was said to walk still. But Pen did not drown himself, as perhaps his mother fancied might be his intention. He liked to go and fish there, and think and think at leisure, as the float quivered in the little eddies of the pond, and the fish flapped about him. If he got a bite he was excited enough: and in this way occasionally brought home, carps, tenches, and eels, which the major cooked in the continental fashion.
By this pond, and under a tree, which was his favorite resort, Pen composed a number of poems suitable to his circumstances--over which verses he blushed in after days, wondering how he could ever have invented such rubbish. And as for the tree, why, it is in a hollow of this very tree, where he used to put his tin box of ground-bait, and other fishing commodities, that he afterward--but we are advancing matters. Suffice it to say, he wrote poems and relieved himself very much. When a man's grief or passion is at this point, it may be loud, but it is not very severe. When a gentleman is cudgeling his brain to find any rhyme for sorrow, beside borrow and to-morrow, his woes are nearer at an end than he thinks for. So were Pen's. He had his hot and cold fits, his days of sullenness and peevishness, and of blank resignation and despondency, and occasional mad paroxysms of rage and longing, in which fits Rebecca would be saddled and galloped fiercely about the country, or into Chatteries, her rider gesticulating wildly on her back, and astonishing carters and turnpikemen as he passed, crying out the name of the false one.
Mr. Foker became a very frequent and welcome visitor at Fairoaks during this period, where his good spirits and oddities always amused the major and Pendennis, while they astonished the widow and little Laura not a little. His tandem made a great sensation in Clavering market-place; where he upset a market stall, and cut Mrs. Pybus's poodle over the shaven quarters, and drank a glass of raspberry bitters at the Clavering Arms. All the society in the little place heard who he was, and looked out his name in their Peerages. He was so young, and their books so old, that his name did not appear in many of their volumes; and his mamma, now quite an antiquated lady, figured among the progeny of the Earl of Rosherville, as Lady Agnes Milton, still. But his name, wealth, and honorable lineage were speedily known about Clavering, where you may be sure that poor Pen's little transaction with the Chatteries actress was also pretty freely discussed.
Looking at the little old town of Clavering St. Mary from the London road as it runs by the lodge at Fairoaks, and seeing the rapid and shining Brawl winding down from the town and skirting the woods of Clavering Park, and the ancient church tower and peaked roofs of the houses rising up among trees and old walls, behind which swells a fair back-ground of sunshiny hills that stretch from Clavering westward toward the sea--the place looks so cheery and comfortable that many a traveler's heart must have yearned toward it from the coach-top, and he must have thought that it was in such a calm friendly nook he would like to shelter at the end of life's struggle. Tom Smith who used to drive the Alacrity coach, would often point to a tree near the river, from which a fine view of the church and town was commanded, and inform his companion on the box that "Artises come and take hoff the Church from that there tree.--It was a Habby once, sir:"--and indeed a pretty view it is, which I recommend to Mr. Stanfield or Mr. Roberts, for their next tour.
Like Constantinople seen from the Bosphorus; like Mrs. Rougemont viewed in her box from the opposite side of the house; like many an object which we pursue in life, and admire before we have attained it; Clavering is rather prettier at a distance than it is on a closer acquaintance. The town so cheerful of aspect a few furlongs off, looks very blank and dreary. Except on market days there is nobody in the streets.
The clack of a pair of pattens echoes through half the place, and you may hear the creaking of the rusty old ensign at the Clavering Arms, without being disturbed by any other noise. There has not been a ball in the assembly rooms since the Clavering volunteers gave one to their colonel, the old Sir Francis Clavering; and the stables which once held a great part of that brilliant, but defunct regiment, are now cheerless and empty, except on Thursdays, when the farmers put up there, and their tilted carts and gigs make a feeble show of liveliness in the place, or on petty sessions, when the magistrates attend in what used to be the old card-room.
On the south side of the market rises up the church, with its great gray towers, of which the sun illuminates the delicate carving; deepening the shadows of the huge buttresses, and gilding the glittering windows, and flaming vanes. The image of the patroness of the church was wrenched out of the porch centuries ago: such of the statues of saints as were within reach of stones and hammer at that period of pious demolition are maimed and headless, and of those who were out of fire, only Doctor Portman knows the names and history, for his curate, Smirke, is not much of an antiquarian, and Mr. Simcoe (husband of the Honorable Mrs. Simcoe) incumbent and architect of the Chapel of Ease in the lower town, thinks them the abomination of desolation.
The rectory is a stout broad-shouldered brick house, of the reign of Anne. It communicates with the church and market by different gates, and stands at the opening of Yew-tree Lane, where the Grammar School (Rev. ---- Wapshot) is; Yew-tree Cottage (Miss Flather); the butcher's slaughtering-house, an old barn or brew-house of the Abbey times, and the Misses Finucane's establishment for young ladies. The two schools had their pews in the loft on each side of the organ, until the Abbey Church getting rather empty, through the falling off of the congregation, who were inveigled to the Heresy-shop in the lower town, the doctor induced the Misses Finucane to bring their pretty little flock down stairs; and the young ladies' bonnets make a tolerable show in the rather vacant aisles. Nobody is in the great pew of the Clavering family except the statues of defunct baronets and their ladies: there is Sir Poyntz Clavering, knight and baronet, kneeling in a square beard opposite his wife in a ruff; a very fat lady, the Dame Rebecca Clavering, in alto-relievo, is borne up to Heaven by two little blue-veined angels, who seem to have a severe task--and so forth. How well, in after life, Pen remembered those effigies, and how often in youth he scanned them as the doctor was grumbling the sermon from the pulpit, and Smirke's mild head and forehead curl peered over the great prayer-book in the desk!
The Fairoaks folks were constant at the old church; their servants had a pew, so had the doctor's, so had Wapshot's, and those of Misses Finucane's establishment, three maids and a very nice looking young man in a livery. The Wapshot family were numerous and faithful. Glanders and his children regularly came to church: so did one of the apothecaries.
Mrs. Pybus went, turn and turn about, to the Low Town church, and to the Abbey: the Charity School and their families of course came; Wapshot's boys made a good cheerful noise, scuffling with their feet as they marched into church and up the organ-loft stair, and blowing their noses a good deal during the service. To be brief, the congregation looked as decent as might be in these bad times. The Abbey Church was furnished with a magnificent screen, and many hatchments and heraldic tombstones.
The doctor spent a great part of his income in beautifying his darling place; he had endowed it with a superb painted window, bought in the Netherlands, and an organ grand enough for a cathedral.
But in spite of organ and window, in consequence of the latter very likely, which had come out of a papistical place of worship and was blazoned all over with idolatry, Clavering New Church prospered scandalously in the teeth of orthodoxy; and many of the doctor's congregation deserted to Mr. Simcoe and the honorable woman his wife.
Their efforts had thinned the very Ebenezer hard by them, which building, before Simcoe's advent used to be so full, that you could see the backs of the congregation squeezing out of the arched windows thereof. Mr. Simcoe's tracts fluttered into the doors of all the doctor's cottages, and were taken as greedily as honest Mrs. Portman's soup, with the quality of which the graceless people found fault. With the folks at the Ribbon Factory situated by the weir on the Brawl side, and round which the Low Town had grown, orthodoxy could make no way at all. Quiet Miss Myra was put out of court by impetuous Mrs. Simcoe and her female aids-de-camp. Ah, it was a hard burthen for the doctor's lady to bear, to behold her husband's congregation dwindling away; to give the precedence on the few occasions when they met to a notorious low-churchman's wife who was the daughter of an Irish Peer; to know that there was a party in Clavering, their own town of Clavering, on which her doctor spent a great deal more than his professional income, who held him up to odium because he played a rubber at whist; and pronounced him to be a heathen because he went to the play. In her grief she besought him to give up the play and the rubber--indeed they could scarcely get a table now, so dreadful was the outcry against the sport--but the doctor declared that he would do what he thought right, and what the great and good George the Third did (whose chaplain he had been): and as for giving up whist because those silly folks cried out against it, he would play dummy to the end of his days with his wife and Myra, rather than yield to their despicable persecutions.
Of the two families, owners of the factory (which had spoiled the Brawl as a trout-stream and brought all the mischief into the town), the senior partner, Mr. Rolt, went to Ebenezer; the junior, Mr. Barker, to the New Church. In a word, people quarreled in this little place a great deal more than neighbors do in London; and in the book club, which the prudent and conciliating Pendennis had set up, and which ought to have been a neutral territory, they bickered so much that nobody scarcely was ever seen in the reading room, except Smirke, who though he kept up a faint amity with the Simcoe faction, had still a taste for magazines and light worldly literature; and old Glanders, whose white head and grizzly mustache might be seen at the window; and of course, little Mrs. Pybus, who looked at every body's letters as the post brought them (for the Clavering reading room, as every one knows, used to be held at Baker's Library, London-street formerly Hog Lane), and read every advertisement in the paper.
It may be imagined how great a sensation was created in this amiable little community when the news reached it of Mr. Pen's love-passages at Chatteries. It was carried from house to house, and formed the subject of talk at high-church, low-church, and no-church tables; it was canvassed by the Misses Finucane and their teachers, and very likely debated by the young ladies in the dormitories, for what we know; Wapshot's big boys had their version of the story, and eyed Pen curiously as he sate in his pew at church, or raised the finger of scorn at him as he passed through Chatteries. They always hated him and called him Lord Pendennis, because he did not wear corduroys as they did, and rode a horse, and gave himself the airs of a buck.
And if the truth must be told, it was Mrs. Portman herself who was the chief narrator of the story of Pen's loves. Whatever tales this candid woman heard, she was sure to impart them to her neighbors; and after she had been put into possession of Pen's secret by the little scandal at Chatteries, poor Doctor Portman knew that it would next day be about the parish of which he was the rector. And so indeed it was; the whole society there had the legend--at the news' room, at the milliner's, at the shoe-shop, and the general warehouse at the corner of the market; at Mrs. Pybus's, at the Glanders's, at the Honorable Mrs. Simcoe's _soiree_, at the factory; nay, through the mill itself the tale was current in a few hours, and young Arthur Pendennis's madness, was in every mouth.
All Doctor Portman's acquaintances barked out upon him when he walked the street the next day. The poor divine knew that his Betsy was the author of the rumor, and groaned in spirit. Well, well--it must have come in a day or two, and it was as well that the town should have the real story. What the Clavering folks thought of Mrs. Pendennis for spoiling her son, and of that precocious young rascal of an Arthur for daring to propose to a play-actress, need not be told here. If pride exists among any folks in our country, and assuredly we have enough of it, there is no pride more deep-seated than that of twopenny old gentlewomen in small towns. "Gracious goodness," the cry was, "how infatuated the mother is about that pert and headstrong boy, who gives himself the airs of a _lord_ on his _blood-horse_, and for whom _our_ society is not good enough, and who would marry an odious painted actress off a booth, where very likely he wants to rant himself. If dear, good Mr. Pendennis had been alive this scandal would never have happened."
No more it would, very likely, nor should we have been occupied in narrating Pen's history. It was true that he gave himself airs to the Clavering folks. Naturally haughty and frank, their cackle and small talk and small dignities bored him, and he showed a contempt which he could not conceal. The doctor and the curate were the only people Pen cared for in the place--even Mrs. Portman shared in the general distrust of him, and of his mother, the widow, who kept herself aloof from the village society, and was sneered at accordingly, because she tried, forsooth, to keep her head up with the great county families. She, indeed! Mrs. Barker at the factory has four times the butcher's meat that goes up to Fairoaks, with all their fine airs.
_&c. &c. &c._: let the reader fill up these details according to his liking and experience of village scandal. They will suffice to show how it was that a good woman, occupied solely in doing her duty to her neighbor and her children, and an honest, brave lad, impetuous, and full of good, and wishing well to every mortal alive, found enemies and detractors among people to whom they were superior, and to whom they had never done any thing like harm. The Clavering curs were yelping all round the house of Fairoaks, and delighted to pull Pen down.
Doctor Portman and Smirke were both cautious of informing the widow of the constant outbreak of calumny which was pursuing poor Pen, though Glanders, who was a friend of the house, kept him _au courant_.
It may be imagined what his indignation was; was there any man in the village whom he could call to account? Presently some wags began to chalk up "Fotheringay forever!" and other sarcastic allusions to late transactions, at Fairoaks gate. Another brought a large play-bill from Chatteries, and wafered it there one night. On one occasion Pen, riding through the lower town, fancied he heard the factory boys jeer him; and finally going through the doctor's gate into the churchyard, where some of Wapshot's boys were lounging, the biggest of them, a young gentleman about twenty years of age, son of a neighboring small squire, who lived in the doubtful capacity of parlor boarder with Mr. Wapshot, flung himself into a theatrical attitude near a newly-made grave, and began repeating Hamlet's verses over Ophelia, with a hideous leer at Pen.
The young fellow was so enraged that he rushed at Hobnell Major with a shriek very much resembling an oath, cut him furiously across the face with the riding-whip which he carried, flung it away, calling upon the cowardly villain to defend himself, and in another minute knocked the bewildered young ruffian into the grave which was just waiting for a different lodger.
Then with his fists clenched, and his face quivering with passion and indignation, he roared out to Mr. Hobnell's gaping companions, to know if any of the blackguards would come on? But they held back with a growl, and retreated as Doctor Portman came up to his wicket, and Mr.
Hobnell, with his nose and lip bleeding piteously, emerged from the grave.
Pen, looking death and defiance at the lads, who retreated toward their side of the churchyard, walked back again through the doctor's wicket, and was interrogated by that gentleman. The young fellow was so agitated he could scarcely speak. His voice broke into a sob, as he answered.
"The ---- coward insulted me, sir," he said; and the doctor passed over the oath, and respected the emotion of the honest, suffering young heart.
Pendennis the elder, who like a real man of the world had a proper and constant dread of the opinion of his neighbor, was prodigiously annoyed by the absurd little tempest which was blowing in Chatteries, and tossing about Master Pen's reputation. Doctor Portman and Captain Glanders had to support the charges of the whole Chatteries society against the young reprobate, who was looked upon as a monster of crime.
Pen did not say any thing about the churchyard scuffle at home; but went over to Baymouth, and took counsel with his friend Harry Foker, Esq., who drove over his drag presently to the Clavering Arms, whence he sent Stoopid with a note to Thomas Hobnell, Esq., at the Rev. J. Wapshot's, and a civil message to ask when he should wait upon that gentleman.
Stoopid brought back word that the note had been opened by Mr. Hobnell, and read to half-a-dozen of the big boys, on whom it seemed to make a great impression; and that after consulting together, and laughing, Mr.
Hobnell said he would send an answer "arter arternoon school, which the bell was a ringing; and Mr. Wapshot he came out in his Master's gownd."