Godolphin, Complete

“About thirteen, I believe.”

“Handsome?”

“I have not seen her since she was seven years old. She promised then to be very beautiful: but she was a remarkably shy, silent child.”

“Miss Vernon,” said the groom of the chambers, throwing open the door.

With the slow step and self-possessed air of womanhood, but with a far haughtier and far colder mien than women commonly assume, Constance Vernon walked through the long apartment, and greeted her future guardian. Though every eye was on her, she did not blush; though the Queens of the London World were round her, her gait and air were more royal than all. Every one present experienced a revulsion of feeling. They were prepared for pity; this was no case in which pity could be given. Even the words of protection died on Lady Erpingham’s lip, and she it was who felt bashful and disconcerted.

I intend to pass rapidly over the years that elapsed till Constance became a woman. Let us glance at her education. Vernon had not only had her instructed in the French and Italian; but, a deep and impassioned scholar himself, he had taught her the elements of the two great languages of the ancient world. The treasures of those languages she afterwards conquered of her own accord.

Lady Erpingham had one daughter, who married when Constance had reached the age of sixteen. The advantages Lady Eleanor Erpingham possessed in her masters and her governess Constance shared. Miss Vernon drew well, and sang divinely; but she made no very great proficiency in the science of music. To say truth, her mind was somewhat too stern, and somewhat too intent on other subjects, to surrender to that most jealous of accomplishments the exclusive devotion it requires.

But of all her attractions, and of all the evidences of her cultivated mind, none equalled the extraordinary grace of her conversation. Wholly disregarding the conventional leading-strings in which the minds of young ladies are accustomed to be held—leading-strings, disguised by the name of “proper diffidence” and “becoming modesty,”—she never scrupled to share, nay, to lead, discussions even of a grave and solid nature. Still less did she scruple to adorn the common trifles that make the sum of conversation with the fascinations of a wit, which, playful, yet deep, rivalled even the paternal source from which it was inherited.

It seems sometimes odd enough to me, that while young ladies are so sedulously taught the accomplishments that a husband disregards, they are never taught the great one he would prize. They are taught to be exhibitors; he wants a companion. He wants neither a singing animal, nor a drawing animal, nor a dancing animal: he wants a talking animal. But to talk they are never taught; all they know of conversation is slander, and that “comes by nature.”

But Constance did talk beautifully; not like a pedant, or a blue, or a Frenchwoman. A child would have been as much charmed with her as a scholar; but both would have been charmed. Her father’s eloquence had descended to her; but in him eloquence commanded, in her it won. There was another trait she possessed in common with her father: Vernon (as most disappointed men are wont) had done the world injustice by his accusations. It was not his poverty and his distresses alone which had induced his party to look coolly on his declining day. They were not without some apparent excuse for desertion—they doubted his sincerity. It is true that it was without actual cause. No modern politician had ever been more consistent. He had refused bribes, though poor; and place, though ambitious. But he was essentially—here is the secret—essentially an intriguant. Bred in the old school of policy, he thought that manoeuvring was wisdom, and duplicity the art of governing. Like Lysander,[1 - Plutarch’s Life of Lysander.] he loved plotting, yet neglected self-interest. There was not a man less open, or more honest. This character, so rare in all countries, is especially so in England. Your blunt squires, your politicians at Bellamy’s, do not comprehend it. They saw in Vernon the arts which deceive enemies, and they dreaded lest, though his friends, they themselves should be deceived. This disposition, so fatal to Vernon, his daughter inherited. With a dark, bold, and passionate genius, which in a man would have led to the highest enterprises, she linked the feminine love of secrecy and scheming. To borrow again from Plutarch and Lysander, “When the skin of the lion fell short, she was quite of opinion that it should be eked out with the fox’s.”

CHAPTER III

THE HERO INTRODUCED TO OUR READER’S NOTICE.—DIALOGUE BETWEEN HIMSELF AND HIS FATHER.—PERCY GODOLPHIN’s CHARACTER AS A BOY.—THE CATASTROPHE OF HIS SCHOOL LIFE

“Percy, remember that it is to-morrow you will return to school,” said Mr. Godolphin to his only son.

Percy pouted, and after a momentary silence replied, “No, father, I think I shall go to Mr. Saville’s. He has asked me to spend a month with him; and he says rightly that I shall learn more with him than at Dr. Shallowell’s, where I am already head of the sixth form.”

“Mr. Saville is a coxcomb, and you are another!” replied the father, who, dressed in an old flannel dressing-gown, with a worn velvet cap on his head, and cowering gloomily over a wretched fire, seemed no bad personification of that mixture of half-hypochondriac, half-miser, which he was in reality. “Don’t talk to me of going to town, sir, or—”

“Father,” interrupted Percy, in a cool and nonchalant tone, as he folded his arms, and looked straight and shrewdly on the paternal face—“father, let us understand each other. My schooling, I suppose, is rather an expensive affair?”

“You may well say that, sir! Expensive!—It is frightful, horrible, ruinous!—Expensive! Twenty pounds a year board and Latin; five guineas washing; five more for writing and arithmetic. Sir, if I were not resolved that you should not want education, though you may want fortune, I should—yes, I should—what do you mean, sir?—you are laughing! Is this your respect, your gratitude to your father?”

A slight shade fell over the bright and intelligent countenance of the boy.

“Don’t let us talk of gratitude,” said he sadly; “Heaven knows what either you or I have to be grateful for! Fortune has left to your proud name but these bare walls and a handful of barren acres; to me she gave a father’s affection—not such as Nature had made it, but cramped and soured by misfortunes.”

Here Percy paused, and his father seemed also struck and affected. “Let us,” renewed in a lighter strain this singular boy, who might have passed, by some months, his sixteenth year,—“let us see if we cannot accommodate matters to our mutual satisfaction. You can ill afford my schooling, and I am resolved that at school I will not stay. Saville is a relation of ours; he has taken a fancy to me; he has even hinted that he may leave me his fortune; and he has promised, at least, to afford me a home and his tuition as long as I like. Give me free passport hereafter to come and go as I list, and I in turn, will engage never to cost you another shilling. Come, sir, shall it be a compact?”

“You wound me, Percy,” said the father, with a mournful pride in his tone; “I have not deserved this, at least from you. You know not, boy—you know not all that has hardened this heart; but to you it has not been hard, and a taunt from you—yes, that is the serpent’s tooth!”

Percy in an instant was at his father’s feet; he seized both his hands, and burst into a passionate fit of tears. “Forgive me,” he said, in broken words; “I—I meant not to taunt you. I am but a giddy boy!—send me to school!—do with me as you will!”

“Ay,” said the old man, shaking his head gently, “you know not what pain a son’s bitter word can send to a parent’s heart. But it is all natural, perfectly natural! You would reproach me with a love of money, it is the sin to which youth is the least lenient. But what! can I look round the world and not see its value, its necessity? Year after year, from my first manhood, I have toiled and toiled to preserve from the hammer these last remnants of my ancestor’s remains. Year after year fortune has slipped from my grasp; and, after all my efforts, and towards the close of a long life, I stand on the very verge of penury. But you cannot tell—no man whose heart is not seared with many years can tell or can appreciate, the motives that have formed my character. You, however,”—and his voice softened as he laid his hand on his son’s head, “you, however,—the gay, the bold, the young,—should not have your brow crossed and your eye dimmed by the cares that surround me. Go! I will accompany you to town; I will see Saville myself. If he be one with whom my son can, at so tender an age, be safely trusted, you shall pay him the visit you wish.”

Percy would have replied but his father checked him; and before the end of the evening, the father had resolved to forget as much as he pleased of the conversation.

The elder Godolphin was one of those characters on whom it is vain to attempt making a permanent impression. The habits of his mind were durably formed: like waters, they yielded to any sudden intrusion, but closed instantly again. Early in life he had been taught that he ought to marry an heiress for the benefit of his estate—his ancestral estate; the restoration of which he had been bred to consider the grand object and ambition of life. His views had been strangely baffled; but the more they were thwarted the more pertinaciously he clung to them. Naturally kind, generous, and social, he had sunk, at length, into the anchorite and the miser. All other speculations that should retrieve his ancestral honours had failed: but there is one speculation that never fails—the speculation of saving! It was to this that he now indissolubly attached himself. At moments he was open to all his old habits; but such moments were rare and few. A cold, hard, frosty penuriousness was his prevalent characteristic. He had sent this son, with eighteen pence in his pocket, to a school of twenty pounds a-year; where, naturally enough, he learned nothing but mischief and cricket: yet he conceived that his son owed him eternal obligations.

Luckily for Percy, he was an especial favourite with a certain not uncelebrated character of the name of Saville; and Saville claimed the privilege of a relation to supply him with money and receive him at his home. Wild, passionate, fond to excess of pleasure, the young Godolphin caught eagerly at these occasional visits; and at each his mind, keen and penetrating as it naturally was, took new flights, and revelled in new views. He was already the leader of his school, the torment of the master, and the lover of the master’s daughter. He was sixteen years old, but a character. A secret pride, a secret bitterness, and an open wit and recklessness of bearing, rendered him to all seeming a boy more endowed with energies than affections. Yet a kind word from a friend’s lips was never without its effect on him, and he might have been led by the silk while he would have snapped the chain. But these were his boyish traits of mind: the world soon altered them.

The subject of the visit to Saville was not again touched upon. A little reflection showed Mr. Godolphin how nugatory were the promises of a schoolboy that he should not cost his father another shilling; and he knew that Saville’s house was not exactly the spot in which economy was best learned. He thought it, therefore, more prudent that his son should return to school.

To school went Percy Godolphin; and about three weeks afterwards, Percy Godolphin was condemned to expulsion for returning, with considerable unction, a slap in the face that he had received from Dr. Shallowell. Instead of waiting for his father’s arrival, Percy made up a small bundle of clothes, let himself drop, by the help of the bed-curtains, from the window of the room in which he was confined, and towards the close of a fine summer’s evening, found himself on the highroad between and London, with independence at his heart and (Saville’s last gift) ten guineas in his pocket.

CHAPTER IV

PERCY’S FIRST ADVENTURE AS A FREE AGENT

It was a fine, picturesque outline of road on which the young outcast found himself journeying, whither he neither knew nor cared. His heart was full of enterprise and the unfledged valour of inexperience. He had proceeded several miles, and the dusk of the evening was setting in, when he observed a stage-coach crawling heavily up a hill, a little ahead of him, and a tall, well-shaped man, walking alongside of it, and gesticulating somewhat violently. Godolphin remarked him with some curiosity; and the man, turning abruptly round, perceived, and in his turn noticed very inquisitively, the person and aspect of the young traveller.

“And how now?” said he, presently, and in an agreeable, though familiar and unceremonious tone of voice; “whither are you bound this time of day?”

“It is no business of yours, friend,” said the boy with the proud petulance of his age; “mind what belongs to yourself.”

“You are sharp on me, young sir,” returned the other; “but it is our business to be loquacious. Know, sir,”—and the stranger frowned—“that we have ordered many a taller fellow than yourself to execution for a much smaller insolence than you seem capable of.”

A laugh from the coach caused Godolphin to lift up his eyes, and he saw the door of the vehicle half-open, as if for coolness, and an arch female face looking down on him.

“You are merry on me, I see,” said Percy; “come out, and I’ll be even with you, pretty one.”

The lady laughed yet more loudly at the premature gallantry of the traveller; but the man, without heeding her, and laying his hand on Percy’s shoulder, said—

“Pray, sir, do you live at B–?” naming the town they were now approaching.

“Not I,” said Godolphin, freeing himself from the intrusion.

“You will, perhaps, sleep there?”

“Perhaps I shall.”

“You are too young to travel alone.”

“And you are too old to make such impertinent remarks,” retorted Godolphin, reddening with anger.

“Faith, I like this spirit, my Hotspur,” said the stranger, coolly. “If you are really going to put up for the night at B–, suppose we sup together?”

“And who and what are you?” asked Percy, bluntly.

“Anything and everything! in other words, an actor!”

“And the young lady–?’

“Is our prima donna. In fact, except the driver, the coach holds none but the ladies and gentlemen of our company. We have made an excellent harvest at A–, and we are now on our way to the theatre at B–; pretty theatre it is, too, and has been known to hold seventy-one pounds eight shillings.” Here the actor fell into a reverie; and Percy, moving nearer to the coach-door, glanced at the damsel, who returned the look with a laugh which, though coquettish, was too low and musical to be called cold.

“So that gentleman, so free and easy in his manners, is not your husband?”

“Heaven forbid! Do you think I should be so gay if he were? But, pooh! what can you know of married life? No!” she continued, with a pretty air of mock dignity; “I am the Belvidera, the Calista, of the company; above all control, all husbanding, and reaping thirty-three shillings a week.”