Like Robinson Crusoe, Richard Frere was born of respectable parents. His father was the representative of a family who in Saxon days would have been termed “Franklins”—i.e., a superior class of yeomen, possessed of certain broad acres, which they farmed themselves. The grandfather Frere having, in a moment of ambition, sent his eldest son to Eton, was made aware of his error when the young hopeful on leaving school declared his intention of going to college, and utterly repudiated the plough-tail. Having a very decided will of his own, and a zealous supporter in his mother, to college he went, and thence to a special pleader, to read for the bar. Being really clever, and determined to prove to his father the wisdom of the course he had adopted, sufficiently industrious also, he got into very tolerable practice. On one occasion, having been retained in a well-known contested peerage case, by his acuteness and eloquence he gained his cause, and at the same time the affections of the successful disputant’s younger sister. His noble client very ungratefully opposed the match, but love and law together proved too powerful for his lordship. One fine evening the young lady made a moonlight flitting of it, and before twelve o’clock on the following morning had become Mrs. Frere. Within a year from this event Richard Frere made his appearance at the cradle terminus of the railroad of life. When he was six years old, his father, after speaking for three hours, in a cause in which he was leader, more eloquently than he had ever before done, broke a blood-vessel, and was carried home a dying man. His wife loved him as woman alone can love—for his sake she had given up friends, fortune, rank, and the pleasures and embellishments of life; for his sake she now gave up life itself. Grief does not always kill quickly, yet Richard’s ninth birthday was spent among strangers. His noble uncle, who felt that by neglecting his sister on her death-bed he had done his duty to his pedigree handsomely, and might now give way to family affection, sent the orphan to school at Westminster, and even allowed him to run wild at Bellefield Park during the holidays.
The agrémens of a public school, acting on a sensitive disposition, gave a tone of bitterness to the boy’s mind, which would have rendered him a misanthrope but for a strong necessity for loving something (the only inheritance his poor mother had left him), which developed itself in attachment to unsympathising silkworms and epicurean white mice during his early boyhood, and in a bizarre but untiring benevolence in after-life, leading him to take endless trouble for the old and unattractive, and to devote himself, body and soul, to forward the interest of those who were fortunate enough to possess his friendship. Of the latter class Lewis Arundel had been one since the day when Frere, a stripling of seventeen, fought his rival, the cock of the school, for having thrashed the new-comer in return for his accidental transgression of some sixth-form etiquette. Ten years had passed over their heads since that day: the cock of the school was a judge in Ceylon, weighed sixteen stone, and had a wife and six little children; Richard Frere was secretary to a scientific institution, with a salary of £400 a year, and a general knowledge of everything of which other people were ignorant; and little Lewis Arundel was standing six feet high, waiting to be let in at the door of his friend’s house, in the respectable and convenient street near Bedford Square, to which he and Faust had found their way, after a prosperous journey by the coach, on the roof of which we left them at the end of the last chapter.
A woman ugly enough to frighten a horse, and old enough for anything, replied in the affirmative to Lewis’s inquiry whether her master was at home, and led the way upstairs, glancing suspiciously at Faust as she did so. On reaching the first landing she tapped at the door; a full, rich, but somewhat gruff voice shouted “Come in,” and Lewis, passing his ancient conductress, entered.
“What, Lewis, old boy! how are you? Don’t touch me, I can’t shake hands, I’m all over paste; I have been mending the backs of two of the old Fathers that I picked up, dirt cheap, at a bookstall as I was coming home to-day: one of them is a real editio princeps—Why, man, how you are grown! Is that Faust? Come here, dog—what a beauty! Ah! you brute, keep your confounded nose out of the paste-pot, do! I must give Aquinas another dab yet. Sit down, man, if you can find a chair—bundle those books under the table. There we are.”
The speaker, who, as the reader has probably conjectured, was none other than Mr. Richard Frere, presented at that moment as singular an appearance as any gentleman not an Ojibbeway Indian, or other natural curiosity for public exhibition in the good city of London, need to do. His apparent age was somewhat under thirty. His face would have been singularly ugly but for three redeeming points—a high, intellectual forehead; full, restless blue eyes, beaming with intelligence; and a bright benevolent smile, which disclosed a brilliant set of white, even teeth, compensating for the disproportioned width of the mouth which contained them. His hair and whiskers, of a rich brown, hung in elf locks about his face and head, which were somewhat too large for his height; his chest and shoulders were also disproportionately broad, giving him an appearance of great strength, which indeed he possessed. He was attired in a chintz dressing-gown that had once rejoiced in a pattern of gaudy colours, but was now reduced to a neutral tint of (we may as well confess it at once) London smoke. He was, moreover, for the greater convenience of the pasting operation, seated cross-legged on the floor, amidst a hecatomb of ponderous volumes.
“I received your letter this morning,” began Lewis, “and, as you see, lost no time in being with you; and now what is it you have heard of, Frere? But first let me thank you——”
“Thank me!” was the reply, “for what? I have done nothing yet, except writing a dozen lines to tell you to take a dusty journey, and leave green trees and nightingales for smoke and bustle—nothing very kind in that, is there? Just look at the dog’s-ears—St. Augustine’s, I mean, not Faust’s.”
“Don’t tease me, there’s a good fellow,” returned Lewis; “I’m not in a humour for jesting at present. I have gone through a good deal in one way or other since you and I last met, and am no longer the light-hearted boy you knew me, but a man, and well-nigh a desperate one.”
“Ay!” rejoined Frere, “that’s the style of thing, is it? Yes; I know all about it. I met Kirschberg the other day, with a beard like a cow’s tail, and he told me that Gretchen had bolted with the Baron.”
“Never mention her name, if you would not drive me mad,” exclaimed Lewis, springing from his chair and pacing the room impatiently. His friend regarded him attentively for a moment, and then uncrossing his legs, and muttering to himself that he had got the cramp, and should make a shocking bad Turk, rose, approached Lewis, and laying his hand on his shoulder, said gravely—